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"| know of no work more valuable for shifting our thinking
and feeling about the place of humans in the world.’

—James Hillman, author of The Soul's Code

a A DA BPR ae

“One of the hundred visionaries who are changing the world.” —Utne Reader

Acclaim for
The spell of the Sensuous

“Forges a thoroughly articulate passage between science and mysti-
cism.... Speculative, learned, and always ‘lucid and precise’ as the
eye of the vulture that confronted him once on a cliff ledge, Abram
has one of those rare minds which, like the mind of a musician or a
great mathematician, fuses dreaminess with smarts.”

—Village Voice Literary Supplement

“This is a landmark book. Scholars will doubtless recognize its bril-
liance, but they may overlook the most important part of Abram’s
achievement: he has written the best instruction manual yet for be-
coming fully human. I walked outside when I was done and the
world was a different place.”

—Bill McKibben,
author of The End of Nature

“Abram manages, almost magically, to stir in us a long-lost memory:
deep in our bones, in our blood, in the air we breathe, we know that
the world lives and speaks to us. .. . He shows that it is possible to
reawaken the animistic dimension of perception and feeling without
renouncing rationality and intellectual analysis....A joy to read
and a brilliant gift to our rapidly darkening world.”

—Shambhala Sun

“This is a major work of research and intuitive brilliance, an archive
of clear ideas. At the end of our century of precarious ecology, The
Spell of the Sensuous strikes the deepest notes of celebration and
alertness—an indispensable book!”

—Howard Norman,
author of The Bird Artist

“A tour-de-force of sustained intelligence, broad scholarship, and a
graceful prose style that has produced one of the most interesting
books about nature published during the past decade.” —Terra Nova

“The wind, the rain, the mountains and rivers, the woodlands and
meadows and all their inhabitants; we need these perhaps even more
for our psyche than for our physical survival. No one that I know of
has presented all this with the literary skill as well as the under-
standing that we find in this work of David Abram. It should be one
of the most widely read and discussed books of these times.”

—Thomas Berry,
author of The Dream of the Earth

“Abram’s Spell must be praised. It’s so well done, well written, well
thought. I know of no work more valuable for shifting our thinking
and feeling about the place of humans in the world.”

—James Hillman,
author of The Soul’s Code

“Important and highly original, a fresh look at the world we live in
but don’t see.”
—Elizabeth Marshall Thomas,
author of The Hidden Life of Dogs

“A masterpiece—combining poetic passion with intellectual rigor and
daring. Electric with energy, it offers us a new approach to scholarly
inquiry: as a fully embodied human animal. It opens pathways and

vistas that will be fruitfully explored for years, indeed for genera-
tions, to come.”
—Joanna Macy,
translator of Rainer Maria Rilke’s
The Book of Hours

“The Spell of the Sensuous does more than place itself on the cutting
edge where ecology meets philosophy, psychology, and history. It
magically subverts the dichotomies of culture and nature, body and
mind, opening a vista of organic being and human possibility that is
often imagined but seldom described. Reader beware, the message is
spell-binding. One cannot read this book without risk of entering
into an altered state of perceptual possibility.”

—Max Oelschlager,
author of The Idea of Wilderness

“This book by David Abram lights up the landscape of language,
flesh, mind, history, mapping us back into the world.”
—Gary Snyder,
author of Mountains and Rivers Without End

“Nobody writes about the ecological depths of the human and more-
than-human world with more love and lyrical sensitivity than David
Abram.”

—Theodore Roszak,
author of Where the Wasteland Ends

“Disclosing the sentience of all nature, and revealing the unsuspected
effect of the more-than-human on our language and our lives, in un-
precedented fashion, Abram generates true philosophy for the
twenty-first century.”

—Lynn Margulis, originator of the Gaia Hypothesis,
author of What Is Life?

David Abram

The Spell of the Sensuous

David Abram, Ph.D., is an ecologist and phil-
osopher whose writings have had a deepening
influence upon the environmental movement in
North America and abroad. A summa cum laude
graduate of Wesleyan University, he holds a doc-
torate in philosophy from the State University of
New York at Stony Brook and has been the recipi-
ent of fellowships from the Watson and Rocke-
feller Foundations and a Lannan Literary Award
for Nonfiction. He is an accomplished sleight-of-
hand magician and has lived and traded magic
with indigenous magicians in Indonesia, Nepal,
and the Americas. This is his first book.

The Spell of the

SCUSuOUs
GF

PERCEPTION AND LANGUAGE
IN A MorE-THAN-HUMAN WORLD

David Abram

VINTAGE BOOKS

A DIVISION OF RANDOM HOUSE, INC. ¢ NEW YORK

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, FEBRUARY 1997

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American
Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by
Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York,
and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada
Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Pan-
theon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York,
in 1996.

Permissions acknowledgments are on page 313.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition
as follows:

Abram, David.

The spell of the sensuous: perception and language in a
more-than-human world / David Abram.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-679-43819-X

1. Philosophy of nature. 2. Body, Human (Philosophy).
3. Sense (Philosophy). 4. Perception (Philosophy).

5. Human ecology. I. Title.

BD581.425 1996 95-31466

128—dc20

CIP

Vintage ISBN: 0-679-77639-7

Book design by Chris Welch

Random House Web address: http://www.randomhouse.com/

Printed in the United States of America

20 19 1817 1615

to the endangered and vanishing ones

Preface and Acknowledgments
. The Ecology of Magic

Contents
LF

A PERSONAL INTRODUCTION TO THE INQUIRY

. Philosophy on the way to Ecology

A TECHNICAL INTRODUCTION TO THE INQUIRY

PART 1: Edmund Husserl and Phenomenology

PART 11: Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the Participatory

Nature of Perception

. The Flesh of Language

. Animism and the Alphabet

. In the Landscape of Language

. Time, Space, and the Eclipse of the Earth
PART 1: Abstraction

PART Il: The Living Present

. The Forgetting and Remembering of the Air
Coda: Turning Inside Out

Notes

Bibliography

Index

137

181

225

Preface and Acknowledgments
a

Humans are tuned for relationship. The eyes, the skin, the
tongue, ears, and nostrils—all are gates where our body receives the
nourishment of otherness. This landscape of shadowed voices, these
feathered bodies and antlers and tumbling streams—these breathing
shapes are our family, the beings with whom we are engaged, with
whom we struggle and suffer and celebrate. For the largest part of
our species’ existence, humans have negotiated relationships with
every aspect of the sensuous surroundings, exchanging possibilities
with every flapping form, with each textured surface and shivering
entity that we happened to focus upon. All could speak, articulating
in gesture and whistle and sigh a shifting web of meanings that we
felt on our skin or inhaled through our nostrils or focused with our
listening ears, and to which we replied—whether with sounds, or
through movements, or minute shifts of mood. The color of sky, the
rush of waves—every aspect of the earthly sensuous could draw us
into a relationship fed with curiosity and spiced with danger. Every
sound was a voice, every scrape or blunder was a meeting—with
Thunder, with Oak, with Dragonfly. And from all of these relation-
ships our collective sensibilities were nourished.

Today we participate almost exclusively with other humans and
with our own human-made technologies. It is a precarious situation,
given our age-old reciprocity with the many-voiced landscape. We
still need that which is other than ourselves and our own creations.
The simple premise of this book is that we are human only in con-
tact, and conviviality, with what is not human.

Does such a premise imply that we must renounce all our com-
plex technologies? It does not. But it does imply that we must renew

x Preface and Acknowledgments

our acquaintance with the sensuous world in which our techniques
and technologies are all rooted. Without the oxygenating breath of
the forests, without the clutch of gravity and the tumbled magic
of river rapids, we have no distance from our technologies, no way
of assessing their limitations, no way to keep ourselves from turning
into them. We need to know the textures, the rhythms and tastes
of the bodily world, and to distinguish readily between such tastes and
those of our own invention. Direct sensuous reality, in all its more-
than-human mystery, remains the sole solid touchstone for an expe-
riential world now inundated with electronically-generated vistas
and engineered pleasures; only in regular contact with the tangible
ground and sky can we learn how to orient and to navigate in the
multiple dimensions that now claim us.

THIS BOOK HAS BEEN WRITTEN WITH TWO GOALS IN MIND. I HAVE
hoped, first, to provide a set of powerful conceptual tools for my
colleagues in the broad world of environmental activism—for con-
servationists, wilderness advocates, community organizers, biore-
gionalists, nature writers, conservation biologists, ecopsychologists,
and all others who are already struggling to make sense of, and to al-
leviate, our current estrangement from the animate earth. Yet I have
also wished to provoke some new thinking within the institutional
realm of scholars, scientists, and educators—many of whom have
been strangely silent in response to the rapid deterioration of wild
nature, the steady vanishing of other species, and the consequent
flattening of our human relationships.

In light of these twin aims, I have tried to maintain a high stan-
dard of theoretical and scholarly precision, without, however, mask-
ing the passion, the puzzlement, and the pleasure that flow from my
own engagement with the living land.

The reader will discover, for instance, that there are two intro-
ductory chapters to the book. There is, first, a “Personal Introduc-
tion,” which details some of the unusual adventures that first led me
to raise the various questions addressed in this work. This chapter
focuses upon my encounters and reflections while living as an itiner-
ant sleight-of-hand magician among traditional, indigenous magi-
cians in rural Asia. Second, there is a “Technical Introduction,”

Preface and Acknowledgments xi

outlining the theoretical approach brought to bear upon the ques-
tions addressed herein. More specifically, this chapter discusses the
development, in the twentieth century, of the tradition of “phenom-
enology”—the study of direct experience. Originally intended to
provide a solid foundation for the empirical sciences, the careful
study of perceptual experience unexpectedly began to make evident
the hidden centrality of the earth in all human experience; indeed,
phenomenological research began to suggest that the human mind
was thoroughly dependent upon (and thoroughly influenced by) our
forgotten relation with the encompassing earth.

While sensorial experience, philosophical reflection, and empiri-
cal information are thoroughly entwined throughout this book,
those readers who have little patience with philosophical matters
should feel free to leap across the technical introduction (Chapter
2)—perhaps touching briefly down to explore those subsections
whose titles provoke their curiosity. Others may wish to dance across
parts of Chapter 3, which necessarily contains a few somewhat tech-
nical sections regarding the bodily nature of language. Toward the
end of Chapter 3 a very brief summary will set the stage for what
follows.

. of

MANY COMRADES LENT THEIR SUPPORT TO THIS PROJECT. AMONG
those whose curiosity and kindness helped engender this book are
the bioregional animateur Chris Wells, ecological cellist Nelson
Denman, seeress Heather Rowntree, dreamtracker R. P. Harbour,
Julia Meeks, Francis Huxley, Sam Hitt, Vicki Dean, Rich Ryan,
Stella Reed, and the rest of the All-Species clan of northern New
Mexico.

The various reflections in this work were honed in passionate
conversations with friends in diverse places, among them David
Rothenberg, Arne Naess, Rachel Wiener, Bill Boaz, Gary Nabhan,
Ivan Illich, Christopher Manes, Drew Leder, Max Oelschlager,
Lynn Margulis, Dorion Sagan, James Hillman, Chellis Glendin-
ning, Laura Sewall, Rick Boothby, Baird Callicott, Starhawk, Rex
and Lisa Weyler, Valerie Gremillion, Tom Jay, and the great-
hearted Thomas Berry. Mountain-wizard Dolores LaChapelle and
letter-scribe Amy Hannon gave essential encouragement in the ear-

xii Preface and Acknowledgments

liest stages. Among those who read through parts of the earliest
manuscript, Peter Manchester, Anthony Weston, Paul Shepard, and
John Elder all offered fine insights.

Philosopher Edward Casey provided fellowship and guidance,
as did the wild salmon-sage Freeman House. Historian Donald
Worster provided encouragement and inspiration. The Buddhist
scholar-poet Stan Lombardo offered unexpected hospitality, as did
prairie-stewards Ken Lassman and Caryn Goldberg. Christian
Gronau and Aileen Douglas shared their keen insights into the
worlds of other animals. Rachel Bagby provided soul sustenance.

My editors were both a pleasure to work with. Jack Shoemaker
deserves my warm thanks for his immediate enthusiasm with the
book, and for taking time out from the bustle of setting up a new
publishing house in order to read and refine the manuscript. Dan
Frank provided patient guidance through the publishing maze, and
many keen-sighted suggestions. He has my gratitude, as does his
assistant Claudine O’Hearn. Thanks, as well, to my agent Ned
Leavitt.

Generous grants from the Foundation for Deep Ecology and
from the Levinson Foundation, as well as a year-long fellowship
from the Rockefeller Foundation, greatly aided the researching and
writing of this book.

Few people are gifted with great artists for parents, as I have
been. Blanche Abram and Irv Abram, pianist and painter, provided
much tactical help during the crafting of this work. I thank them for
their encouragement, and for the intuition of beauty that they care-
fully granted to their children.

Finally, I extend a gratitude beyond words to my closest friend
and ally, Grietje Laga, whose graceful intelligence deepens all my
thoughts, and whose gentle magic ceaselessly returns me to my
senses. Her company has made this whole adventure ever so much
more wonderful.

As THE CRICKETS’ SOFT AUTUMN HUM
Is TO US
SO ARE WE TO THE TREES
AS ARE THEY

TO THE ROCKS AND THE HILLS

—Gary Snyder

the spell of the
Sensuous
LY

The Ecology of Magic

A PERSONAL INTRODUCTION TO THE INQUIRY

rice paddies of eastern Bali and found myself falling

through space. Over my head the black sky was rippling
with stars, densely clustered in some regions, almost blocking out
the darkness between them, and more loosely scattered in other
areas, pulsing and beckoning to each other. Behind them all
streamed the great river of light with its several tributaries. Yet the
Milky Way churned beneath me as well, for my hut was set in the
middle of a large patchwork of rice paddies, separated from each
other by narrow two-foot-high dikes, and these paddies were all
filled with water. The surface of these pools, by day, reflected per-
fectly the blue sky, a reflection broken only by the thin, bright green
tips of new rice. But by night the stars themselves glimmered from

| ATE ONE EVENING I STEPPED OUT OF MY LITTLE HUT IN THE

4 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

the surface of the paddies, and the river of light whirled through the
darkness underfoot as well as above; there seemed no ground in
front of my feet, only the abyss of star-studded space falling away
forever.

I was no longer simply beneath the night sky, but also above it—
the immediate impression was of weightlessness. I might have been
able to reorient myself, to regain some sense of ground and gravity,
were it not for a fact that confounded my senses entirely: between
the constellations below and the constellations above drifted count-
less fireflies, their lights flickering like the stars, some drifting up to
join the clusters of stars overhead, others, like graceful meteors,
slipping down from above to join the constellations underfoot, and
all these paths of light upward and downward were mirrored, as
well, in the still surface of the paddies. I felt myself at times falling
through space, at other moments floating and drifting. I simply
could not dispel the profound vertigo and giddiness; the paths of the
fireflies, and their reflections in the water’s surface, held me in a sus-
tained trance. Even after I crawled back to my hut and shut the door
on this whirling world, I felt that now the little room in which I lay
was itself floating free of the earth.

Fireflies! It was in Indonesia, you see, that I was first introduced
to the world of insects, and there that I first learned of the great in-
fluence that insects—such diminutive entities—could have upon the
human senses. I had traveled to Indonesia on a research grant to
study magic—more precisely, to study the relation between magic
and medicine, first among the traditional sorcerers, or dukuns, of the
Indonesian archipelago, and later among the dzankris, the tradi-
tional shamans of Nepal. One aspect of the grant was somewhat
unique: I was to journey into rural Asia not outwardly as an anthro-
pologist or academic researcher, but as a magician in my own right,
in hopes of gaining a more direct access to the local sorcerers. I had
been a professional sleight-of-hand magician for five years back in
the United States, helping to put myself through college by per-
forming in clubs and restaurants throughout New England. I had, as
well, taken a year off from my studies in the psychology of percep-
tion to travel as a street magician through Europe and, toward the
end of that journey, had spent some months in London, England,
exploring the use of sleight-of-hand magic in psychotherapy, as a

The Ecology of Magic 5

means of engendering communication with distressed individuals
largely unapproachable by clinical healers.! The success of this work
suggested to me that sleight-of-hand might lend itself well to the cu-
rative arts, and I became, for the first time, interested in the relation,
largely forgotten in the West, between folk medicine and magic.

It was this interest that led to the aforementioned grant, and to
my sojourn as a magician in rural Asia. There, my sleight-of-hand
skills proved invaluable as a means of stirring the curiosity of the
local shamans. For magicians—whether modern entertainers or in-
digenous, tribal sorcerers—have in common the fact that they work
with the malleable texture of perception. When the local sorcerers
gleaned that I had at least some rudimentary skill in altering the
common field of perception, I was invited into their homes, asked to
share secrets with them, and eventually encouraged, even urged, to
participate in various rituals and ceremonies.

But the focus of my research gradually shifted from questions re-
garding the application of magical techniques in medicine and ritual
curing toward a deeper pondering of the relation between traditional
magic and the animate natural world. This broader concern seemed
to hold the keys to the earlier questions. For none of the several is-
land sorcerers that I came to know in Indonesia, nor any of the
dzankris with whom I lived in Nepal, considered their work as ritual
healers to be their major role or function within their communities.
Most of them, to be sure, were the primary healers or “doctors” for
the villages in their vicinity, and they were often spoken of as such
by the inhabitants of those villages. But the villagers also sometimes
spoke of them, in low voices and in very private conversations, as
witches (or “lejaks” in Bali), as dark magicians who at night might
well be practicing their healing spells backward (or while turning to
the left instead of to the right) in order to afflict people with the very
diseases that they would later work to cure by day. Such suspicions
seemed fairly common in Indonesia, and often were harbored with
regard to the most effective and powerful healers, those who were
most renowned for their skill in driving out illness. For it was as-
sumed that a magician, in order to expel malevolent influences, must
have a strong understanding of those influences and demons—even,
in some areas, a Close rapport with such powers. I myself never con-
sciously saw any of those magicians or shamans with whom I be-

6 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

came acquainted engage in magic for harmful purposes, nor any
convincing evidence that they had ever done so. (Few of the magi-
cians that I came to know even accepted money in return for their
services, although they did accept gifts in the way of food, blankets,
and the like.) Yet I was struck by the fact that none of them ever did
or said anything to counter such disturbing rumors and specula-
tions, which circulated quietly through the regions where they lived.
Slowly, I came to recognize that it was through the agency of such
rumors, and the ambiguous fears that such rumors engendered in
the village people, that the sorcerers were able to maintain a basic
level of privacy. If the villagers did not entertain certain fears about
the local sorcerer, then they would likely come to obtain his or her
magical help for every little malady and disturbance; and since a
more potent practitioner must provide services for several large vil-
lages, the sorcerer would be swamped from morning to night with
requests for ritual aid. By allowing the inevitable suspicions and
fears to circulate unhindered in the region (and sometimes even en-
couraging and contributing to such rumors), the sorcerer ensured
that only those who were in real and profound need of his skills
would dare to approach him for help.

This privacy, in turn, left the magician free to attend to what he
acknowledged to be his primary craft and function. A clue to this
function may be found in the circumstance that such magicians
rarely dwell at the heart of their village; rather, their dwellings are
commonly at the spatial periphery of the community or, more often,
out beyond the edges of the village—amid the rice fields, or in a for-
est, or a wild cluster of boulders. I could easily attribute this to the
just-mentioned need for privacy, yet for the magician in a traditional
culture it seems to serve another purpose as well, providing a spatial
expression of his or her symbolic position with regard to the com-
munity. For the magician’s intelligence is not encompassed within
the society; its place is at the edge of the community, mediating be-
tween the human community and the larger community of beings
upon which the village depends for its nourishment and sustenance.
This larger community includes, along with the humans, the multi-
ple nonhuman entities that constitute the local landscape, from the
diverse plants and the myriad animals—birds, mammals, fish, rep-
tiles, insects—that inhabit or migrate through the region, to the par-

The Ecology of Magic 7

ticular winds and weather patterns that inform the local geography,
as well as the various landforms—forests, rivers, caves, mountains—
that lend their specific character to the surrounding earth.

The traditional or tribal shaman, I came to discern, acts as an in-
termediary between the human community and the larger ecological
field, ensuring that there is an appropriate flow of nourishment, not
just from the landscape to the human inhabitants, but from the
human community back to the local earth. By his constant rituals,
trances, ecstasies, and “journeys,” he ensures that the relation be-
tween human society and the larger society of beings is balanced and
reciprocal, and that the village never takes more from the living land
than it returns to it—not just materially but with prayers, propitia-
tions, and praise. The scale of a harvest or the size of a hunt are al-
ways negotiated between the tribal community and the natural world
that it inhabits. To some extent every adult in the community is en-
gaged in this process of listening and attuning to the other presences
that surround and influence daily life. But the shaman or sorcerer is
the exemplary voyager in the intermediate realm between the
human and the more-than-human worlds, the primary strategist and
negotiator in any dealings with the Others.

And it is only asa result of her continual engagement with the an-
imate powers that dwell beyond the human community that the tra-
ditional magician is able to alleviate many individual illnesses that
arise within that community. The sorcerer derives her ability to cure
ailments from her more continuous practice of “healing” or balanc-
ing the community’s relation to the surrounding land. Disease, in
such cultures, is often conceptualized as a kind of systemic imbal-
ance within the sick person, or more vividly as the intrusion of a de-
monic or malevolent presence into his body. There are, at times,
malevolent influences within the village or tribe itself that disrupt
the health and emotional well-being of susceptible individuals
within the community. Yet such destructive influences within the
human community are commonly traceable to a disequilibrium be-
tween that community and the larger field of forces in which it is
embedded. Only those persons who, by their everyday practice, are
involved in monitoring and maintaining the relations between the
human village and the animate landscape are able to appropriately
diagnose, treat, and ultimately relieve personal ailments and ill-

8 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

nesses arising within the village. Any healer who was not simultane-
ously attending to the intertwined relation between the human com-
munity and the larger, more-than-human field, would likely dispel
an illness from one person only to have the same problem arise (per-
haps in a new guise) somewhere else in the community. Hence, the
traditional magician or medicine person functions primarily as an
intermediary between human and nonhuman worlds, and only sec-
ondarily as a healer. Without a continually adjusted awareness of
the relative balance or imbalance between the human group and its
nonhuman environ, along with the skills necessary to modulate that
primary relation, any “healer” is worthless—indeed, not a healer at
all. The medicine person’s primary allegiance, then, is not to the
human community, but to the earthly web of relations in which that
community is embedded—it is from this that his or her power to al-
leviate human illness derives—and this sets the local magician apart
from other persons.

The primacy for the magician of nonhuman nature—the central-
ity of his relation to other species and to the earth—is not always ev-
ident to Western researchers. Countless anthropologists have
managed to overlook the ecological dimension of the shaman’s craft,
while writing at great length of the shaman’s rapport with “super-
natural” entities. We can attribute much of this oversight to the
modern, civilized assumption that the natural world is largely deter-
minate and mechanical, and that that which is regarded as mysteri-
ous, powerful, and beyond human ken must therefore be of some
other, nonphysical realm above nature, “supernatural.”

The oversight becomes still more comprehensible when we real-
ize that many of the earliest European interpreters of indigenous
lifeways were Christian missionaries. For the Church had long as-
sumed that only human beings have intelligent souls, and that the
other animals, to say nothing of trees and rivers, were “created” for
no other reason than to serve humankind. We can easily understand
why European missionaries, steeped in the dogma of institutional-
ized Christianity, assumed a belief in supernatural, otherworldly
powers among those tribal persons whom they saw awestruck and
entranced by nonhuman (but nevertheless natural) forces. What is
remarkable is the extent to which contemporary anthropology still
preserves the ethnocentric bias of these early interpreters. We no

The Ecology of Magic 9

longer describe the shamans’ enigmatic spirit-helpers as the “super-
stitious claptrap of heathen primitives”—we have cleansed ourselves
of at least that much ethnocentrism; yet we still refer to such enig-
matic forces, respectfully now, as “supernaturals”—for we are un-
able to shed the sense, so endemic to scientific civilization, of nature
as a rather prosaic and predictable realm, unsuited to such mysteries.
Nevertheless, that which is regarded with the greatest awe and won-
der by indigenous, oral cultures is, I suggest, none other than what
we view as nature itself. The deeply mysterious powers and entities
with whom the shaman enters into a rapport are ultimately the same
forces—the same plants, animals, forests, and winds—that to liter-
ate, “civilized” Europeans are just so much scenery, the pleasant
backdrop of our more pressing human concerns.

The most sophisticated definition of “magic” that now circulates
through the American counterculture is “the ability or power to alter
one’s consciousness at will.” No mention is made of any reason for
altering one’s consciousness. Yet in tribal cultures that which we call
“magic” takes its meaning from the fact that humans, in an indige-
nous and oral context, experience their own consciousness as simply
one form of awareness among many others. The traditional magi-
cian cultivates an ability to shift out of his or her common state of
consciousness precisely in order to make contact with the other or-
ganic forms of sensitivity and awareness with which human exis-
tence is entwined. Only by temporarily shedding the accepted
perceptual logic of his culture can the sorcerer hope to enter into re-
lation with other species on their own terms; only by altering the
common organization of his senses will he be able to enter into a rap-
port with the multiple nonhuman sensibilities that animate the local
landscape. It is this, we might say, that defines a shaman: the ability
to readily slip out of the perceptual boundaries that demarcate his or
her particular culture—boundaries reinforced by social customs,
taboos, and most importantly, the common speech or language—in
order to make contact with, and learn from, the other powers in the
land. His magic is precisely this heightened receptivity to the mean-
ingful solicitations—songs, cries, gestures—of the larger, more-
than-human field.

Magic, then, in its perhaps most primordial sense, is the experi-
ence of existing in a world made up of multiple intelligences, the in-

10 ©39°'THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

tuition that every form one perceives—from the swallow swooping
overhead to the fly on a blade of grass, and indeed the blade of grass
itself—is an experiencing form, an entity with its own predilec-
tions and sensations, albeit sensations that are very different from
our own.

To be sure, the shaman’s ecological function, his or her role as in-
termediary between human society and the land, is not always obvi-
ous at first blush, even to a sensitive observer. We see the sorcerer
being called upon to cure an ailing tribesman of his sleeplessness, or
perhaps simply to locate some missing goods; we witness him enter-
ing into trance and sending his awareness into other dimensions in
search of insight and aid. Yet we should not be so ready to interpret
these dimensions as “supernatural,” nor to view them as realms en-
tirely “internal” to the personal psyche of the practitioner. For it is
likely that the “inner world” of our Western psychological experi-
ence, like the supernatural heaven of Christian belief, originates in
the loss of our ancestral reciprocity with the animate earth. When
the animate powers that surround us are suddenly construed as hav-
ing less significance than ourselves, when the generative earth is
abruptly defined as a determinate object devoid of its own sensa-
tions and feelings, then the sense of a wild and multiplicitous other-
ness (in relation to which human existence has always oriented itself)
must migrate, either into a supersensory heaven beyond the natural
world, or else into the human skull itself—the only allowable refuge,
in this world, for what is ineffable and unfathomable.

But in genuinely oral, indigenous cultures, the sensuous world it-
self remains the dwelling place of the gods, of the numinous powers
that can either sustain or extinguish human life. It is not by sending
his awareness out beyond the natural world that the shaman makes
contact with the purveyors of life and health, nor by journeying into
his personal psyche; rather, it is by propelling his awareness laterally,
outward into the depths of a landscape at once both sensuous
and psychological, the living dream that we share with the soaring
hawk, the spider, and the stone silently sprouting lichens on its
coarse surface.

The magician’s intimate relationship with nonhuman nature be-
comes most evident when we attend to the easily overlooked back-
ground of his or her practice—not just to the more visible tasks of

The Ecology of Magic 11

curing and ritual aid to which she is called by individual clients, or to
the larger ceremonies at which she presides and dances, but to the
content of the prayers by which she prepares for such ceremonies,
and to the countless ritual gestures that she enacts when alone, the
daily propitiations and praise that flow from her toward the land and
its many voices.

ALL THIS ATTENTION TO NONHUMAN NATURE WAS, AS I HAVE MEN-
tioned, very far from my intended focus when I embarked on my re-
search into the uses of magic and medicine in Indonesia, and it was
only gradually that I became aware of this more subtle dimension of
the native magician’s craft. The first shift in my preconceptions
came rather quietly, when I was staying for some days in the home of
a young “balian,” or magic practitioner, in the interior of Bali. I had
been provided with a simple bed in a separate, one-room building in
the balian’s family compound (most compound homes, in Bali, are
comprised of several separate small buildings, for sleeping and for
cooking, set on a single enclosed plot of land), and early each morn-
ing the balian’s wife came to bring me a small but delicious bowl of
fruit, which I ate by myself, sitting on the ground outside, leaning
against the wall of my hut and watching the sun slowly climb
through the rustling palm leaves. I noticed, when she delivered the
fruit, that my hostess was also balancing a tray containing many lit-
tle green plates: actually, they were little boat-shaped platters, each
woven simply and neatly from a freshly cut section of palm frond.
The platters were two or three inches long, and within each wasa lit-
tle mound of white rice. After handing me my breakfast, the woman
and the tray disappeared from view behind the other buildings, and
when she came by some minutes later to pick up my empty bow], the
tray in her hands was empty as well.

The second time that I saw the array of tiny rice platters, I asked
my hostess what they were for. Patiently, she explained to me that
they were offerings for the household spirits. When I inquired about
the Balinese term that she used for “spirit,” she repeated the same
explanation, now in Indonesian, that these were gifts for the spirits
of the family compound, and I saw that I had understood her cor-
rectly. She handed me a bowl of sliced papaya and mango, and dis-

12 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

appeared around the corner. I pondered for a minute, then set down
the bowl, stepped to the side of my hut, and peered through the
trees. At first unable to see her, I soon caught sight of her crouched
low beside the corner of one of the other buildings, carefully setting
what I presumed was one of the offerings on the ground at that spot.
Then she stood up with the tray, walked to the other visible corner
of the same building, and there slowly and carefully set another of-
fering on the ground. I returned to my bowl of fruit and finished my
breakfast. That afternoon, when the rest of the household was busy,
I walked back behind the building where I had seen her set down the
two offerings. There were the little green platters, resting neatly at
the two rear corners of the building. But the mounds of rice that had
been within them were gone.

The next morning I finished the sliced fruit, waited for my host-
ess to come by for the empty bowl, then quietly headed back behind
the buildings. Two fresh palm-leaf offerings sat at the same spots
where the others had been the day before. These were filled with
rice. Yet as I gazed at one of these offerings, I abruptly realized, with
a start, that one of the rice kernels was actually moving.

Only when I knelt down to look more closely did I notice a line of
tiny black ants winding through the dirt to the offering. Peering still
closer, I saw that two ants had already climbed onto the offering and
were Struggling with the uppermost kernel of rice; as I watched, one
of them dragged the kernel down and off the leaf, then set off with
it back along the line of ants advancing on the offering. The second
ant took another kernel and climbed down with it, dragging and
pushing, and fell over the edge of the leaf, then a third climbed onto
the offering. The line of ants seemed to emerge from a thick clump
of grass around a nearby palm tree. I walked over to the other offer-
ing and discovered another line of ants dragging away the white ker-
nels. This line emerged from the top of a little mound of dirt, about
fifteen feet away from the buildings. There was an offering on the
ground by a corner of my building as well, and a nearly identical line
of ants. I walked into my room chuckling to myself: the balian and
his wife had gone to so much trouble to placate the household spirits
with gifts, only to have their offerings stolen by little six-legged
thieves. What a waste! But then a strange thought dawned on me:
what if the ants were the very “household spirits” to whom the of-
ferings were being made?

The Ecology of Magic 13

I soon began to discern the logic of this. The family compound, -
ike most on this tropical island, had been constructed in the vicinity

of several ant colonies. Since a great deal of cooking took place in the
compound (which housed, along with the balian and his wife and
children, various members of their extended family), and also much
preparation of elaborate offerings of foodstuffs for various rituals
and festivals in the surrounding villages, the grounds and the build-
ings at the compound were vulnerable to infestations by the sizable
ant population. Such invasions could range from rare nuisances to a
periodic or even constant siege. It became apparent that the daily
palm-frond offerings served to preclude such an attack by the nat-
ural forces that surrounded (and underlay) the family’s land. The
daily gifts of rice kept the ant colonies occupied—and, presumably,
satisfied. Placed in regular, repeated locations at the corners of vari-
ous structures around the compound, the offerings seemed to estab-
lish certain boundaries between the human and ant communities;
by honoring this boundary with gifts, the humans apparently hoped
to persuade the insects to respect the boundary and not enter the
buildings.

Yet I remained puzzled by my hostess’s assertion that these were
gifts “for the spirits.” To be sure, there has always been some confu-
sion between our Western notion of “spirit” (which so often is de-
fined in contrast to matter or “flesh”), and the mysterious presences
to which tribal and indigenous cultures pay so much respect. I have
already alluded to the gross misunderstandings arising from the cir-
cumstance that many of the earliest Western students of these other
customs were Christian missionaries all too ready to see occult
ghosts and immaterial phantoms where the tribespeople were simply
offering their respect to the local winds. While the notion of “spirit”
has come to have, for us in the West, a primarily anthropomorphic
or human association, my encounter with the ants was the first of
many experiences suggesting to me that the “spirits” of an indige-
nous culture are primarily those modes of intelligence or awareness
that do not possess a human form.

As humans, we are well acquainted with the needs and capacities
of the human body—we live our own bodies and so know, from
within, the possibilities of our form. We cannot know, with the same
familiarity and intimacy, the lived experience of a grass snake or a
snapping turtle; we cannot readily experience the precise sensations

14 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

of a hummingbird sipping nectar from a flower or a rubber tree
soaking up sunlight. And yet we do know how it feels to sip from a
fresh pool of water or to bask and stretch in the sun. Our experience
may indeed be a variant of these other modes of sensitivity; never-
theless, we cannot, as humans, precisely experience the living sensa-
tions of another form. We do not know, with full clarity, their desires
Or motivations; we cannot know, or can never be sure that we know,
what they know. That the deer does experience sensations, that it
carries knowledge of how to orient in the land, of where to find food
and how to protect its young, that it knows well how to survive in the
forest without the tools upon which we depend, is readily evident to
our human senses. That the mango tree has the ability to create fruit,
or the yarrow plant the power to reduce a child’s fever, is also evi-
dent. To humankind, these Others are purveyors of secrets, carriers
of intelligence that we ourselves often need: it is these Others who
can inform us of unseasonable changes in the weather, or warn us of
imminent eruptions and earthquakes, who show us, when foraging,
where we may find the ripest berries or the best route to follow back
home. By watching them build their nests and shelters, we glean
clues regarding how to strengthen our own dwellings, and their
deaths teach us of our own. We receive from them countless gifts of
food, fuel, shelter, and clothing. Yet still they remain Other to us, in-
habiting their own cultures and displaying their own rituals, never
wholly fathomable.

Moreover, it is not only those entities acknowledged by Western
civilization as “alive,” not only the other animals and the plants that
speak, as spirits, to the senses of an oral culture, but also the mean-
dering river from which those animals drink, and the torrential
monsoon rains, and the stone that fits neatly into the palm of the
hand. The mountain, too, has its thoughts. The forest birds
whirring and chattering as the sun slips below the horizon are vocal
organs of the rain forest itself.’

Bali, of course, is hardly an aboriginal culture; the complexity of
its temple architecture, the intricacy of its irrigation systems, the re-
splendence of its colorful festivals and crafts all bespeak the influ-
ence of various civilizations, most notably the Hindu complex of
India. In Bali, nevertheless, these influences are thoroughly inter-
twined with the indigenous animism of the Indonesian archipelago;

The Ecology of Magic 15

the Hindu gods and goddesses have been appropriated, as it were, by
the more volcanic, eruptive spirits of the local terrain.

Yet the underlying animistic cultures of Indonesia, like those of
many islands in the Pacific, are steeped as well in beliefs often re-
ferred to by ethnologists as.“ancestor worship,” and some may argue
that the ritual reverence paid to one’s long-dead human ancestors
(and the assumption of their influence in present life), easily invali-
dates my assertion that the various “powers” or “spirits” that move
through the discourse of indigenous, oral peoples are ultimately tied
to nonhuman (but nonetheless sentient) forces in the enveloping
landscape.

This objection rests upon certain assumptions implicit in Chris-
tian civilization, such as the assumption that the “spirits” of dead
persons necessarily retain their human form, and that they reside in
a domain outside of the physical world to which our senses give us
access. However, most indigenous tribal peoples have no such ready
recourse to an immaterial realm outside earthly nature. Our strictly
human heavens and hells have only recently been abstracted from
the sensuous world that surrounds us, from this more-than-human
realm that abounds in its own winged intelligences and cloven-
hoofed powers. For almost all oral cultures, the enveloping and sen-
suous earth remains the dwelling place of both the living and the
dead. The “body”—whether human or otherwise—is not yet a me-
chanical object in such cultures, but is a magical entity, the mind’s
own sensuous aspect, and at death the body’s decomposition into
soil, worms, and dust can only signify the gradual reintegration of
one’s ancestors and elders into the living landscape, from which all,
too, are born.

Each indigenous culture elaborates this recognition of metamor-
phosis in its own fashion, taking its clues from the particular terrain
in which it is situated. Often the invisible atmosphere that animates
the visible world—the subtle presence that circulates both within us
and between all things—retains within itself the spirit or breath of
the dead person until the time when that breath will enter and ani-
mate another visible body—a bird, or a deer, or a field of wild grain.
Some cultures may burn, or “cremate,” the body in order to more
completely return the person, as smoke, to the swirling air, while
that which departs as flame is offered to the sun and stars, and that

16 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

which lingers as ash is fed to the dense earth. Still other cultures may
dismember the body, leaving certain parts in precise locations where
they will likely be found by condors, or where they will be consumed
by mountain lions or by wolves, thus hastening the re-incarnation of
that person into a particular animal realm within the landscape.
Such examples illustrate simply that death, in tribal cultures, initi-
ates a metamorphosis wherein the person’s presence does not “van-
ish” from the sensible world (where would it go?) but rather remains
as an animating force within the vastness of the landscape, whether
subtly, in the wind, or more visibly, in animal form, or even as the
eruptive, ever to be appeased, wrath of the volcano. “Ancestor wor-
ship,” in its myriad forms, then, is ultimately another mode of at-
tentiveness to nonhuman nature; it signifies not so much an awe or
reverence of human powers, but rather a reverence for those forms
that awareness takes when it is not in human form, when the familiar
human embodiment dies and decays to become part of the encom-
passing cosmos.

This cycling of the human back into the larger world ensures that
the other forms of experience that we encounter—whether ants, or
willow trees, or clouds—are never absolutely alien to ourselves. De-
spite the obvious differences in shape, and ability, and style of being,
they remain at least distantly familiar, even familial. It is, paradoxi-
cally, this perceived kinship or consanguinity that renders the differ-
ence, or otherness, so eerily potent.*

SEVERAL MONTHS AFTER MY ARRIVAL IN BALI, I LEFT THE VILLAGE
in which I was staying to visit one of the pre-Hindu sites on the is-
land. I arrived on my bicycle early in the afternoon, after the bus car-
rying tourists from the coast had departed. A flight of steps took me
down into a lush, emerald valley, lined by cliffs on either side, awash
with the speech of the river and the sighing of the wind through
high, unharvested grasses. On a small bridge crossing the river I met
an old woman carrying a wide basket on her head and holding the
hand of a little, shy child; the woman grinned at me with the red,
toothless smile of a beetle nut chewer. On the far side of the river I
stood in front of a great moss-covered complex of passageways,
rooms, and courtyards carved by hand out of the black volcanic rock.

The Ecology of Magic 17

I noticed, at a bend in the canyon downstream, a further series of
caves carved into the cliffs. These appeared more isolated and re-
mote, unattended by any footpath I could discern. I set out through
the grasses to explore them. This proved much more difficult than I
anticipated, but after getting lost in the tall grasses, and fording the
river three times, I at last found myself beneath the caves. A short
scramble up the rock wall brought me to the mouth of one of them,
and I entered on my hands and knees. It was a wide but low opening,
perhaps only four feet high, and the interior receded only about five
or six feet into the cliff. The floor and walls were covered with
mosses, painting the cave with green patterns and softening the
harshness of the rock; the place, despite its small size—or perhaps
because of it—had an air of great friendliness. I climbed to two
other caves, each about the same size, but then felt drawn back to the
first one, to sit cross-legged on the cushioning moss and gaze out
across the emerald canyon. It was quiet inside, a kind of intimate
sanctuary hewn into the stone. I began to explore the rich resonance
of the enclosure, first just humming, then intoning a simple chant
taught to me by a balian some days before. I was delighted by the
overtones that the cave added to my voice, and sat there singing for
a long while. I did not notice the change in the wind outside, or the
cloud shadows darkening the valley, until the rains broke—suddenly
and with great force. The first storm of the monsoon!

I had experienced only slight rains on the island before then, and
was startled by the torrential downpour now sending stones tum-
bling along the cliffs, building puddles and then ponds in the green
landscape below, swelling the river. There was no question of re-
turning home—I would be unable to make my way back through the
flood to the valley’s entrance. And so, thankful for the shelter, I re-
crossed my legs to wait out the storm. Before long the rivulets falling
along the cliff above gathered themselves into streams, and two
small waterfalls cascaded across the cave’s mouth. Soon I was look-
ing into a solid curtain of water, thin in some places, where the
canyon’s image flickered unsteadily, and thickly rushing in others.
My senses were all but overcome by the wild beauty of the cascade
and by the roar of sound, my body trembling inwardly at the weird
sense of being sealed into my hiding place.

And then, in the midst of all this tumult, I noticed a small, deli-

18 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

cate activity. Just in front of me, and only an inch or two to my side
of the torrent, a spider was climbing a thin thread stretched across
the mouth of the cave. As I watched, it anchored another thread to
the top of the opening, then slipped back along the first thread and
joined the two at a point about midway between the roof and the
floor. I lost sight of the spider then, and for a while it seemed that it
had vanished, thread and all, until my focus rediscovered it. Two
more threads now radiated from the center to the floor, and then an-
other; soon the spider began to swing between these as on a circular
trellis, trailing an ever-lengthening thread which it affixed to each ra-
diating rung as it moved from one to the next, spiraling outward.
The spider seemed wholly undaunted by the tumult of waters
spilling past it, although every now and then it broke off its spiral
dance and climbed to the roof or the floor to tug on the radii there,
assuring the tautness of the threads, then crawled back to where it
left off. Whenever I lost the correct focus, I waited to catch sight of
the spinning arachnid, and then let its dancing form gradually draw
the lineaments of the web back into visibility, tying my focus into
each new knot of silk as it moved, weaving my gaze into the ever-
deepening pattern.

And then, abruptly, my vision snagged on a strange incongruity:
another thread slanted across the web, neither radiating nor spiral-
ing from the central juncture, violating the symmetry. As I followed
it with my eyes, pondering its purpose in the overall pattern, I began
to realize that it was on a different plane from the rest of the web, for
the web slipped out of focus whenever this new line became clearer.
I soon saw that it led to its own center, about twelve inches to the
right of the first, another nexus of forces from which several threads
stretched to the floor and the ceiling. And then I saw that there was
a different spider spinning this web, testing its tautness by dancing
around it like the first, now setting the silken cross weaves around
the nodal point and winding outward. The two spiders spun inde-
pendently of each other, but to my eyes they wove a single intersect-
ing pattern. This widening of my gaze soon disclosed yet another
spider spiraling in the cave’s mouth, and suddenly I realized that
there were many overlapping webs coming into being, radiating out
at different rhythms from myriad centers poised—some higher,
some lower, some minutely closer to my eyes and some farther—be-
tween the stone above and the stone below.

The Ecology of Magic 19

I sat stunned and mesmerized before this ever-complexifying ex-
panse of living patterns upon patterns, my gaze drawn like a breath
into one converging group of lines, then breathed out into open
space, then drawn down into another convergence. The curtain of
water had become utterly silent—lI tried at one point to hear it, but
could not. My senses were entranced.

I had the distinct impression that I was watching the universe
being born, galaxy upon galaxy... .

NIGHT FILLED THE CAVE WITH DARKNESS. THE RAIN HAD NOT
stopped. Yet, strangely, I felt neither cold nor hungry—only re-
markably peaceful and at home. Stretching out upon the moist,
mossy floor near the back of the cave, I slept.

When I awoke, the sun was staring into the canyon, the grasses
below rippling with bright blues and greens. I could see no trace of
the webs, nor their weavers. Thinking that they were invisible to my
eyes without the curtain of water behind them, I felt carefully with
my hands around and through the mouth of the cave. But the webs
were gone. I climbed down to the river and washed, then hiked
across and out of the canyon to where my cycle was drying in the
sun, and headed back to my own valley.

I have never, since that time, been able to encounter a spider
without feeling a great strangeness and awe. To be sure, insects and
spiders are not the only powers, or even central presences, in the In-
donesian universe. But they were my introduction to the spirits, to
the magic afoot in the land. It was from them that I first learned of
the intelligence that lurks in nonhuman nature, the ability that an
alien form of sentience has to echo one’s own, to instill a reverbera-
tion in oneself that temporarily shatters habitual ways of seeing and
feeling, leaving one open to a world all alive, awake, and aware. It
was from such small beings that my senses first learned of the count-
less worlds within worlds that spin in the depths of this world that
we commonly inhabit, and from them that I learned that my body
could, with practice, enter sensorially into these dimensions. The
precise and minuscule craft of the spiders had so honed and focused
my awareness that the very webwork of the universe, of which my
own flesh was a part, seemed to be being spun by their arcane art. I
have already spoken of the ants, and of the fireflies, whose sensory

20 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

likeness to the lights in the night sky had taught me the fickleness of
gravity. The long and cyclical trance that we call malaria was also
brought to me by insects, in this case mosquitoes, and I lived for
three weeks in a feverish state of shivers, sweat, and visions.

I had rarely before paid much attention to the natural world. But
my exposure to traditional magicians and seers was shifting my
senses; I became increasingly susceptible to the solicitations of non-
human things. In the course of struggling to decipher the magicians’
odd gestures or to fathom their constant spoken references to pow-
ers unseen and unheard, I began to see and to hear in a manner I
never had before. When a magician spoke of a power or “presence”
lingering in the corner of his house, I learned to notice the ray of
sunlight that was then pouring through a chink in the roof, illumi-
nating a column of drifting dust, and to realize that that column of
light was indeed a power, influencing the air currents by its warmth,
and indeed influencing the whole mood of the room; although I had
not consciously seen it before, it had already been structuring my ex-
perience. My ears began to attend, in a new way, to the songs of
birds—no longer just a melodic background to human speech, but
meaningful speech in its own right, responding to and commenting
on events in the surrounding earth. I became a student of subtle dif-
ferences: the way a breeze may flutter a single leaf on a whole tree,
leaving the other leaves silent and unmoved (had not that leaf, then,
been brushed by a magic?); or the way the intensity of the sun’s heat
expresses itself in the precise rhythm of the crickets. Walking along
the dirt paths, I learned to slow my pace in order to feel the differ-
ence between one nearby hill and the next, or to taste the presence of
a particular field at a certain time of day when, as I had been told by
a local dukun, the place had a special] power and proffered unique
gifts. It was a power communicated to my senses by the way the
shadows of the trees fell at that hour, and by smells that only then
lingered in the tops of the grasses without being wafted away by the
wind, and other elements I could only isolate after many days of
stopping and listening.

And gradually, then, other animals began to intercept me in my
wanderings, as if some quality in my posture or the rhythm of my
breathing had disarmed their wariness; I would find myself face-to-
face with monkeys, and with large lizards that did not slither away

The Ecology of Magic 21

when I spoke, but leaned forward in apparent curiosity. In rural
Java, I often noticed monkeys accompanying me in the branches
overhead, and ravens walked toward me on the road, croaking.
While at Pangandaran, a nature preserve on a peninsula jutting out
from the south coast of Java (“a place of many spirits,” I was told by
nearby fishermen), I stepped out from a clutch of trees and found
myself looking into the face of one of the rare and beautiful bison
that exist only on that island. Our eyes locked. When it snorted, I
snorted back; when it shifted its shoulders, I shifted my stance;
when I tossed my head, it tossed its head in reply. I found myself
caught in a nonverbal conversation with this Other, a gestural duet
with which my conscious awareness had very little to do. It was as if
my body in its actions was suddenly being motivated by a wisdom
older than my thinking mind, as though it was held and moved by a
logos, deeper than words, spoken by the Other’s body, the trees, and
the stony ground on which we stood.

ANTHROPOLOGY’S INABILITY TO DISCERN THE SHAMAN’S ALLE-
giance to nonhuman nature has led to a curious circumstance in
the “developed world” today, where many persons in search of spir-
itual understanding are enrolling in workshops concerned with
“shamanic” methods of personal discovery and revelation. Psy-
chotherapists and some physicians have begun to specialize in
“shamanic healing techniques.” “Shamanism” has thus come to
connote an alternative form of therapy; the emphasis, among these
new practitioners of popular shamanism, is on personal insight and
curing. These are noble aims, to be sure, yet they are secondary to,
and derivative from, the primary role of the indigenous shaman, a
role that cannot be fulfilled without long and sustained exposure to
wild nature, to its patterns and vicissitudes. Mimicking the indige-
nous shaman’s curative methods without his intimate knowledge of
the wider natural community cannnot, if I am correct, do anything
more than trade certain symptoms for others, or shift the locus of
dis-ease from place to place within the human community, For the
source of stress lies in the relation between the human community
and the natural landscape.

Western industrial society, of course, with its massive scale and

22 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

hugely centralized economy, can hardly be seen in relation to any
particular landscape or ecosystem; the more-than-human ecology
with which it is directly engaged is the biosphere itself. Sadly, our
culture’s relation to the earthly biosphere can in no way be con-
sidered a reciprocal or balanced one: with thousands of acres of
nonregenerating forest disappearing every hour, and hundreds of
our fellow species becoming extinct each month as a result of our
civilization’s excesses, we can hardly be surprised by the amount of
epidemic illness in our culture, from increasingly severe immune
dysfunctions and cancers, to widespread psychological distress, de-
pression, and ever more frequent suicides, to the accelerating num-
ber of household killings and mass murders committed for no
apparent reason by otherwise coherent individuals.

From an animistic perspective, the clearest source of all this dis-
tress, both physical and psychological, lies in the aforementioned vi-
olence needlessly perpetrated by our civilization on the ecology of
the planet; only by alleviating the latter will we be able to heal the
former. While this may sound at first like a simple statement of faith,
it makes eminent and obvious sense as soon as we acknowledge our
thorough dependence upon the countless other organisms with
whom we have evolved. Caught up in a mass of abstractions, our at-
tention hypnotized by a host of human-made technologies that only
reflect us back to ourselves, it is all too easy for us to forget our car-
nal inherence in a more-than-human matrix of sensations and sensi-
bilities. Our bodies have formed themselves in delicate reciprocity
with the manifold textures, sounds, and shapes of an animate
earth—our eyes have evolved in subtle interaction with other eyes, as
our ears are attuned by their very structure to the howling of wolves
and the honking of geese. To shut ourselves off from these other
voices, to continue by our lifestyles to condemn these other sensibil-
ities to the oblivion of extinction, is to rob our own senses of their
integrity, and to rob our minds of their coherence. We are human
only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human.

ALTHOUGH THE INDONESIAN ISLANDS ARE HOME TO AN ASTONISH-
ing diversity of birds, it was only when I went to study among the
Sherpa people of the high Himalayas that I was truly initiated into

The Ecology of Magic 23

the avian world. The Himalayas are young mountains, their peaks
not yet rounded by the endless action of wind and ice, and so the
primary dimension of the visible landscape is overwhelmingly verti-
cal. Even in the high ridges one seldom attains a view of a distant
horizon; instead one’s vision is deflected upward by the steep face of
the next mountain. The whole land has surged skyward in a manner
still evident in the lines and furrows of the mountain walls, and this
ancient dynamism readily communicates itself to the sensing body.

In such a world those who dwell and soar in the sky are the pri-
mary powers. They alone move easily in such a zone, swooping
downward to become a speck near the valley floor, or spiraling into
the heights on invisible currents. The wingeds, alone, carry the im-
mediate knowledge of what is unfolding on the far side of the next
ridge, and hence it is only by watching them that one can be kept ap-
prised of climatic changes in the offing, as well as of subtle shifts in
the flow and density of air currents in one’s own valley. Several of
the shamans that I met in Nepal had birds as their close familiars.
Ravens are constant commentators on village affairs. The smaller,
flocking birds perform aerobatics in unison over the village rooftops,
twisting and swerving in a perfect sympathy of motion, the whole
flock appearing like a magic banner that floats and flaps on air cur-
rents over the village, then descends in a heap, only to be carried
aloft by the wind a moment later, rippling and swelling.

For some time | visited a Sherpa dzankni whose rock home was
built into one of the steep mountainsides of the Khumbu region in
Nepal. On one of our walks along the narrow cliff trails that wind
around the mountain, the dzankri pointed out to me a certain boul-
der, jutting out from the cliff, on which he had “danced” before at-
tempting some especially difficult cures. I recognized the boulder
several days later when hiking back down toward the dzankri’s home
from the upper yak pastures, and I climbed onto the rock, not to
dance but to ponder the pale white and red lichens that gave life to
its surface, and to rest. Across the dry valley, two lammergeier con-
dors floated between gleaming, snow-covered peaks. It was a ringing
blue Himalayan day, clear as a bell. After afew moments I took a sil-
ver coin out of my pocket and aimlessly began a simple sleight-of-
hand exercise, rolling the coin over the knuckles of my right hand. I
had taken to practicing this somewhat monotonous exercise in re-

24 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

sponse to the endless flicking of prayer-beads by the older Sherpas,
a practice usually accompanied by a repetitively chanted prayer:
“Om Mani Padme Hum” (O the Jewel in the Lotus). But there was
no prayer accompanying my revolving coin, aside from my quiet
breathing and the dazzling sunlight. I noticed that one of the two
condors in the distance had swerved away from its partner and was
now floating over the valley, wings outstretched. As I watched it
grow larger, I realized, with some delight, that it was heading in my
general direction; I stopped rolling the coin and stared. Yet just then
the lammergeier halted in its flight, motionless for a moment against
the peaks, then swerved around and headed back toward its partner
in the distance. Disappointed, I took up the coin and began rolling it
along my knuckles once again, its silver surface catching the sunlight
as it turned, reflecting the rays back into the sky. Instantly, the con-
dor swung out from its path and began soaring back in a wide arc.
Once again, I watched its shape grow larger. As the great size of the
bird became apparent, I felt my skin begin to crawl and come alive,
like a swarm of bees all in motion, and a humming grew loud in my
ears. The coin continued rolling along my fingers. The creature
loomed larger, and larger still, until, suddenly, it was there—an im-
mense silhouette hovering just above my head, huge wing feathers
rustling ever so slightly as they mastered the breeze. MIy fingers were
frozen, unable to move; the coin dropped out of my hand. And then
I felt myself stripped naked by an alien gaze infinitely more lucid
and precise than my own. I do not know for how long I was trans-
fixed, only that I felt the air streaming past naked knees and heard
the wind whispering in my feathers long after the Visitor had de-
parted.

I RETURNED TO A NORTH AMERICA WHOSE ONLY INDIGENOUS
species of condor was on the brink of extinction, mostly as a result
of lead poisoning from bullets in the carrion it consumes. But I did
not think about this. I was excited by the new sensibilities that had
stirred in me—my newfound awareness of a more-than-human
world, of the great potency of the land, and particularly of the keen
intelligence of other animals, large and small, whose lives and cul-
tures interpenetrate our own. I startled neighbors by chattering with

The Ecology of Magic 25

squirrels, who swiftly climbed down the trunks of their trees and
across lawns to banter with me, or by gazing for hours on end at a
heron fishing in a nearby estuary, or at gulls opening clams by drop-
ping them from a height onto the rocks along the beach.

Yet, very gradually, I began to lose my sense of the animals’ own
awareness. The gulls’ technique for breaking open the clams began
to appear as a largely automatic behavior, and I could not easily feel
the attention that they must bring to each new shell. Perhaps each
shell was entirely the same as the last, and no spontaneous attention
was really necessary. ...

I found myself now observing the heron from outside its world,
noting with interest its careful high-stepping walk and the sudden
dart of its beak into the water, but no longer feeling its tensed yet
poised alertness with my own muscles. And, strangely, the suburban
squirrels no longer responded to my chittering calls. Although I
wished to, I could no longer focus my awareness on engaging in their
world as I had so easily done a few weeks earlier, for my attention
was quickly deflected by internal, verbal deliberations of one sort or
another—by a conversation I now seemed to carry on entirely within
myself. The squirrels had no part in this conversation.

It became increasingly apparent, from books and articles and dis-
cussions with various people, that other animals were not as awake
and aware as I had assumed, that they lacked any real language and
hence the possibility of thought, and that even their seemingly spon-
taneous responses to the world around them were largely “pro-
grammed” behaviors, “coded” in the genetic material now being
mapped by biologists. Indeed, the more I spoke about other animals,
the less possible it became to speak to them. I gradually came to dis-
cern that there was no common ground between the unlimited
human intellect and the limited sentience of other animals, no
medium through which we and they might communicate with and
reciprocate one another.

As the expressive and sentient landscape slowly faded behind my
more exclusively human concerns, threatening to become little more
than an illusion or fantasy, I began to feel—particularly in my chest
and abdomen—as though I were being cut off from vital sources of
nourishment. I was indeed reacclimating to my own culture, becom-
ing more attuned to its styles of discourse and interaction, yet my

26 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

bodily senses seemed to be losing their acuteness, becoming less
awake to subtle changes and patterns. The thrumming of crickets,
and even the songs of the local blackbirds, readily faded from my
awareness after a few moments, and it was only by an effort of will
that I could bring them back into the perceptual field. The flight of
sparrows and of dragonflies no longer sustained my focus very long,
if indeed they gained my attention at all. My skin quit registering
the various changes in the breeze, and smells seemed to have faded
from the world almost entirely, my nose waking up only once or
twice a day, perhaps while cooking, or when taking out the garbage.

In Nepal, the air had been filled with smells—whether in the
towns, where burning incense combined with the aromas of roasting
meats and honeyed pastries and fruits for trade in the open market,
and the stench of organic refuse rotting in the ravines, and some-
times of corpses being cremated by the river; or in the high moun-
tains, where the wind carried the whiffs of countless wildflowers,
and of the newly turned earth outside the villages where the fragrant
dung of yaks was drying in round patties on the outer walls of the
houses, to be used, when dry, as fuel for the household fires, and
where smoke from those many home fires always mingled in the
outside air. And sounds as well: the chants of aspiring monks and
adepts blended with the ringing of prayer bells on near and distant
slopes, accompanied by the raucous croaks of ravens, and the sigh of
the wind pouring over the passes, and the flapping of prayer flags,
and the distant hush of the river cascading through the far-below
gorge.

There the air was a thick and richly textured presence, filled with
invisible but nonetheless tactile, olfactory, and audible influences. In
the United States, however, the air seemed thin and void of sub-
stance or influence. It was not, here, a sensuous medium—the felt
matrix of our breath and the breath of the other animals and plants
and soils—but was merely an absence, and indeed was constantly re-
ferred to in everyday discourse as mere empty space. Hence, in
America I found myself lingering near wood fires and even garbage
dumps—much to the dismay of my friends—for only such an inten-
sity of smells served to remind my body of its immersion in an en-
veloping medium, and with this experience of being immersed in a
world of influences came a host of body memories from my year
amono the shamans and village people of rural Asia.

The Ecology of Magic 27

I BEGAN TO FIND OTHER WAYS, AS WELL, OF TAPPING THE VERY DIF-
ferent sensations and perceptions that I had grown accustomed to in
the “undeveloped world,” by living for extended periods on native
Indian reservations in the southwestern desert and along the north-
western coast, or by hiking off for weeks at a time into the North
American wilderness. Intermittently, I began to wonder if my cul-
ture’s assumptions regarding the lack of awareness in other animals
and in the land itself was less a product of careful and judicious rea-
soning than of a strange inability to clearly perceive other animals—
a real inability to clearly see, or focus upon, anything outside the
realm of human technology, or to hear as meaningful anything other
than human speech. The sad results of our interactions with the rest
of nature were being reported in every newspaper—from the deple-
tion of topsoil due to industrial farming techniques to the fouling of
groundwater by industrial wastes, from the rapid destruction of an-
cient forests to, worst of all, the ever-accelerating extinction of our
fellow species—and these remarkable and disturbing occurrences, all
readily traceable to the ongoing activity of “civilized” humankind,
did indeed suggest the possibility that there was a perceptual prob-
lem in my culture, that modern, “civilized” humanity simply did not
perceive surrounding nature in a clear manner, if we have even been
perceiving it at all.

The experiences that shifted the focus of my research in rural In-
donesia and Nepal had shown me that nonhuman nature can be per-
ceived and experienced with far more intensity and nuance than is
generally acknowledged in the West. What was it that made possible
the heightened sensitivity to extrahuman reality, the profound atten-
tiveness to other species and to the Earth that is evidenced in so
many of these cultures, and that had so altered my awareness that
my senses now felt stifled and starved by the patterns of my own cul-
ture? Or, reversing the question, what had made possible the absence
of this attentiveness in the modern West? For Western culture, too,
has its indigenous origins. If the relative attunement to environing
nature exhibited by native cultures is linked to a more primordial,
participatory mode of perception, how had Western civilization
come to be so exempt from this sensory reciprocity? How, that is,
have we become so deaf and so blind to the vital existence of other

28 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

species, and to the animate landscapes they inhabit, that we now so
casually bring about their destruction?

To be sure, our obliviousness to nonhuman nature is today held
in place by ways of speaking that simply deny intelligence to other
species and to nature in general, as well as by the very structures of
our civilized existence—by the incessant drone of motors that shut
out the voices of birds and of the winds; by electric lights that
eclipse not only the stars but the night itself; by air “conditioners”
that hide the seasons; by offices, automobiles, and shopping malls
that finally obviate any need to step outside the purely human world
at all. We consciously encounter nonhuman nature only as it has
been circumscribed by our civilization and its technologies: through
our domesticated pets, on the television, or at the zoo (or, at best, in
carefully managed “nature preserves”). The plants and animals we
consume are neither gathered nor hunted—they are bred and har-
vested in huge, mechanized farms. “Nature,” it would seem, has be-
come simply a stock of “resources” for human civilization, and so we
can hardly be surprised that our civilized eyes and ears are some-
what oblivious to the existence of perspectives that are not human at
all, or that a person either entering into or returning to the West
from a nonindustrial culture would feel startled and confused by the
felt absence of nonhuman powers.

Still, the current commodification of “nature” by civilization tells
us little or nothing of the perceptual shift that made possible this re-
duction of the animal (and the earth) to an object, little of the
process whereby our senses first relinquished the power of the
Other, the vision that for so long had motivated our most sacred rit-
uals, our dances, and our prayers.

But can we even hope to catch a glimpse of this process, which
has given rise to so many of the habits and linguistic prejudices that
now structure our very thinking? Certainly not if we gaze toward
that origin from within the midst of the very civilization it engen-
dered. But perhaps we may make our stand along the edge of that
civilization, like a magician, or like a person who, having lived
among another tribe, can no longer wholly return to his own. He
lingers half within and half outside of his community, open as well,
then, to the shifting voices and flapping forms that craw! and hover
beyond the mirrored walls of the city. And even there, moving along

The Ecology of Magic 29

those walls, he may hope to find the precise clues to the mystery of
how those walls were erected, and how a simple boundary became a
barrier, only if the moment is timely—only, that is, if the margin he
frequents is a temporal as well as a spatial edge, and the temporal
structure that it bounds is about to dissolve, or metamorphose, into
something else.

Philosophy on the Way
to Ecology

A TECHNICAL INTRODUCTION TO THE INQUIRY

PaRT I:
EDMUND HUSSERL AND PHENOMENOLOGY

enology in order to understand the strange difference between
the experienced world, or worlds, of indigenous, vernacular
cultures and the world of modern European and North American
civilization. For phenomenology is the Western philosophical tradi-
tion that has most forcefully called into question the modern as-
sumption of a single, wholly determinable, objective reality.
This assumption has its source in René Descartes’s well-known
separation of the thinking mind, or subject, from the material world

I T IS NATURAL THAT WE TURN TO THE TRADITION OF PHENOM-

32 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

of things, or objects. Actually, Galileo had already asserted that only
those properties of matter that are directly amenable to mathemati-
cal measurement (such as size, shape, and weight) are real; the other,
more “subjective” qualities such as sound, taste, and color are
merely illusory impressions, since the “book of nature” is written in
the language of mathematics alone. In his words:

This grand book the universe... is written in the language of
mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other
geometric figures without which it is humanly impossible to un-
derstand a single word of it; without these, one wanders about in
a dark labyrinth.!

Yet it was only after the publication of Descartes’s Meditations, in
1641, that material reality came to be commonly spoken of as a
strictly mechanical realm, as a determinate structure whose laws of
operation could be discerned only via mathematical analysis. By ap-
parently purging material reality of subjective experience, Galileo
cleared the ground and Descartes laid the foundation for the con-
struction of the objective or “disinterested” sciences, which by their
feverish and forceful investigations have vielded so much of the
knowledge and so many of the technologies that have today become
commonplace in the West. The chemical table of the elements, au-
tomobiles, smallpox vaccines, “close-up” images of the outer plan-
ets—so much that we have come to assume and depend upon has
emerged from the bold experimentalization of the world by the ob-
jective sciences.

Yet these sciences consistently overlook our ordinary, everyday
experience of the world around us. Our direct experience is neces-
sarily subjective, necessarily relative to our own position or place in
the midst of things, to our particular desires, tastes, and concerns.
The everyday world in which we hunger and make love is hardly the
mathematically determined “object” toward which the sciences di-
rect themselves. Despite all the mechanical artifacts that now sur-
round us, the world in which we find ourselves before we set out to
calculate and measure it is not an inert or mechanical object but a
living field, an open and dynamic landscape subject to its own
moods and metamorphoses.

Philosophy on the Way to Ecology 33

My life and the world’s life are deeply intertwined; when I wake
up one morning to find that a week-long illness has subsided and
that my strength has returned, the world, when I step outside, fairly
sparkles with energy and activity: swallows are swooping by in vivid
flight; waves of heat rise from the newly paved road smelling
strongly of tar; the old red barn across the field juts into the sky at an
intense angle. Likewise, when a haze descends upon the valley in
which I dwell, it descends upon my awareness as well, muddling my
thoughts, making my muscles yearn for sleep. The world and I re-
ciprocate one another. The landscape as I directly experience it is
hardly a determinate object; it is an ambiguous realm that responds
to my emotions and calls forth feelings from me in turn. Even the
most detached scientist must begin and end her study in this inde-
terminate field of experience, where shifts of climate or mood may
alter his experiment or her interpretation of “the data”: the scientist,
too, must take time off from his measurements and analyses to eat,
to defecate, to converse with friends, to interact straightforwardly
with a familiar world that is never explicitly thematized and defined.
Indeed, it is precisely from his experience in this preconceptual and
hence ambiguous world that an individual is first drawn to become a
scientist, to adopt the ways of speaking and seeing that are acknowl-
edged as appropriate by the scientific community, to affect the
proper disinterested or objective attitude with regard to a certain
range of natural events. The scientist does not randomly choose a
specific discipline or specialty, but is drawn to a particular field by a
complex of subjective experiences and encounters, many of which
unfold far from the laboratory and its rarefied atmosphere. Further,
the scientist never completely succeeds in making himself into a
pure spectator of the world, for he cannot cease to live in the world
as ahuman among other humans, or as a creature among other crea-
tures, and his scientific concepts and theories necessarily borrow
aspects of their character and texture from his untheorized, sponta-
neously lived experience.

Indeed, the ostensibly “value-free” results of our culture’s inves-
tigations into biology, physics, and chemistry ultimately come to dis-
play themselves in the open and uncertain field of everyday life,
whether embedded in social policies with which we must come to
terms or embodied in new technologies with which we all must grap-

34 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

ple. Thus, the living world—this ambiguous realm that we experi-
ence in anger and joy, in grief and in love—is both the soil in which
all our sciences are rooted and the rich humus into which their re-
sults ultimately return, whether as nutrients or as poisons. Our
spontaneous experience of the world, charged with subjective, emo-
tional, and intuitive content, remains the vital and dark ground of all
our objectivity.

And yet this ground goes largely unnoticed or unacknowledged in
scientific culture. In a society that accords priority to that which is
predictable and places a premium on certainty, our spontaneous,
preconceptual experience, when acknowledged at all, is referred to
as “merely subjective.” The fluid realm of direct experience has
come to be seen as a secondary, derivative dimension, a mere conse-
quence of events unfolding in the “realer” world of quantifiable and
measurable scientific “facts.” It is a curious inversion of the actual,
demonstrable state of affairs. Subatomic quanta are now taken to be
more primordial and “real” than the world we experience with our
unaided senses. The living, feeling, and thinking organism is as-
sumed to derive, somehow, from the mechanical body whose reflexes
and “systems” have been measured and mapped, the living person
now an epiphenomenon of the anatomized corpse. That it takes liv-
ing, sensing subjects, complete with their enigmatic emotions and
unpredictable passions, to conceive of those subatomic fields, or to
dissect and anatomize the body, is readily overlooked, or brushed
aside as inconsequential.

Nevertheless, the ambiguity of experience is already a part of any
phenomenon that draws our attention. For whatever we perceive is
necessarily entwined with our own subjectivity, already blended
with the dynamism of life and sentience. The living pulse of subjec-
tive experience cannot finally be stripped from the things that we
study (in order to expose the pure unadulterated “objects”) without
the things themselves losing all existence for us. Such conundrums
are commonly consigned to psychology, to that science that studies
subjective awareness and perception. And so perhaps by turning to
psychology we can expect to find a recognition and avowal of the pre-
objective dimension that permeates and sustains every reality that we
know, and hence an understanding of the manner in which subjective
experience both supports and sets limits to the positive sciences.

Philosophy on the Way to Ecology 35

In psychology, however, we discover nothing of the sort. Instead,
we find a discipline that is itself modeled on the positivism of the
“hard” sciences, a science wherein the psyche has itself been reified
into an “object,” a thing to be studied like any other thing in the de-
terminate, objective world. Much of cognitive science strives to
model the computational processes that ostensibly underlie mental
experience. While for Galileo and Descartes perceptual qualities like
color and taste were illusory, unreal properties because of their am-
biguous and indeterminate character, mathematical indices have at
last been found for these qualities as well, or rather such qualities are
now studied only to the extent that they can be rendered, by what-
ever process of translation, into quantities. Here as elsewhere, the
everyday world—the world of our direct, spontaneous experience—
is still assumed to derive from an impersonal, objective dimension of
pure “facts” that we glimpse only through our instruments and
equations.

IT WAS HIS FRUSTRATION WITH SUCH ASSUMPTIONS, AND WITH THE
early discipline of psychology—which, far from directing attention
toward the fluid region of direct experience, was already at the start
of the twentieth century solidifying the “mind” into another “ob-
ject” in the mathematized and mechanical universe—that led
Edmund Husserl to inaugurate the philosophical discipline of phe-
nomenology. Phenomenology, as he articulated it in the early 1900s,
would turn toward “the things themselves,” toward the world as it is
experienced in its felt immediacy. Unlike the mathematics-based
sciences, phenomenology would seek not to explain the world, but to
describe as closely as possible the way the world makes itself evident
to awareness, the way things first arise in our direct, sensorial expe-
rience.? By thus returning to the taken-for-granted realm of subjec-
tive experience, not to explain it but simply to pay attention to its
rhythms and textures, not to capture or control it but simply to be-
come familiar with its diverse modes of appearance—and ultimately
to give voice to its enigmatic and ever-shifting patterns—phenome-
nology would articulate the ground of the other sciences. It was
Husserl’s hope that phenomenology, as a rigorous “science of expe-
rience,” would establish the other sciences at last upon a firm foot-

36 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

ing—not, perhaps, as solid as the fixed and finished “object” upon
which those sciences pretend to stand, but the only basis possible for
a knowledge that necessarily emerges from our lived experience of
the things around us. In the words of the French phenomenologist
Maurice Merleau-Ponty:

All my knowledge of the world, even my scientific knowledge, is
gained from my own particular point of view, or from some expe-
rience of the world without which the symbols of science would
be meaningless. The whole universe of science is built upon the
world as directly experienced, and if we want to subject science
itself to rigorous scrutiny and arrive at a precise assessment of its
meaning and scope, we must begin by reawakening the basic ex-
perience of the world, of which science is the second-order ex-
pression. ... To return to things themselves is to return to that
world which precedes knowledge, of which knowledge always
speaks, and in relation to which every scientific schematization is
an abstract and derivative sign-language, as is geography in rela-
tion to the countryside in which we have learnt beforehand what

a forest, a prairie or a river is.?

] ntersubjectivity

In the early stages of his project, Husserl spoke of the world of ex-
perience (the “phenomenal” world) as a thoroughly subjective
realm. In order to explore this realm philosophically, he insisted that
it be viewed as a wholly mental dimension, an immaterial field of ap-
pearances. That which experiences this dimension—the experienc-
ing self, or subject—was similarly described by Husserl as a pure
consciousness, a “transcendental” mind or ego.

Perhaps by designating subjective reality as a nonmaterial, tran-
scendental realm, Husserl hoped to isolate this qualitative dimen-
sion from the apparently mechanical world of material “facts” that
was then being constructed by the objective sciences (and thus to
protect this realm from being colonized by those technological

Philosophy on the Way to Ecology 37

methods of inquiry). Yet his insistence upon the mental character of
phenomenal reality led critics to attack Husserl’s method as being
inherently solipsistic—an approach that seals the philosopher inside
his own solitary experience, rendering him ultimately unable to rec-
ognize anyone or anything outside of his own mind.

Husserl struggled long and hard to answer this important criti-
cism. How does our subjective experience enable us to recogize the
reality of other selves, other experiencing beings? The solution
seemed to implicate the body—one’s own as well as that of the
other—as a singularly important structure within the phenomenal
field. The body is that mysterious and multifaceted phenomenon
that seems always to accompany one’s awareness, and indeed to be
the very location of one’s awareness within the field of appearances.
Yet the phenomenal field also contains many other bodies, other
forms that move and gesture in a fashion similar to one’s own. While
one’s own body is experienced, as it were, only from within, these
other bodies are experienced from outside; one can vary one’s dis-
tance from these bodies and can move around them, while this is im-
possible in relation to one’s own body.

Despite this difference, Husserl discerned that there was an in-
escapable affinity, or affiliation, between these other bodies and one’s
own. The gestures and expressions of these other bodies, viewed
from without, echo and resonate one’s own bodily movements and
gestures, experienced from within. By an associative “empathy,” the
embodied subject comes to recognize these other bodies as other
centers of experience, other subjects.*

In this manner, carefully describing the ways in which the sub-
jective field of experience, mediated by the body, opens onto other
subjectivities—other selves besides one’s own self—Husser! sought
to counter the charge of solipsism that had been directed against his
phenomenology. The field of appearances, while still a thoroughly
subjective realm, was now seen to be inhabited by multiple subjec-
tivities; the phenomenal field was no longer the isolate haunt of a
solitary ego, but a collective landscape, constituted by other experi-
encing subjects as well as by oneself.

There remain, however, many phenomena in the experiential
field that are not collective or commonly shared. When daydream-
ing, for example, my attention is carried by phenomena whose

38 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

contours and movements I am able to alter at will, a whole phantas-
magoria of images that nevertheless lack the solidity of bodies. Such
forms offer very little resistance to my gaze. They are not, that is,
held in place by gazes other than my own—these are entirely my im-
ages, my phantasies and fears, my dreamings. And so I am brought,
like Husserl, to recognize at least two regions of the experiential or
phenomenal field: one of phenomena that unfold entirely for me—
images that arise, as it were, on this side of my body—and another
region of phenomena that are, evidently, responded to and experi-
enced by other embodied subjects as well as by myself. These latter
phenomena are still subjective—they appear to me within a field of
experience colored by my mood and my current concerns—and yet I
cannot alter or dissipate them at will, for they seem to be buttressed
by many involvements besides my own. That tree bending in the
wind, this cliff wall, the cloud drifting overhead: these are not
merely subjective; they are intersubjective phenomena—phenomena
experienced by a multiplicity of sensing subjects.

HUSSERL’S NOTION OF INTERSUBJECTIVITY SUGGESTED A REMARK-
able new interpretation of the so-called “objective world.” For the
conventional contrast between “subjective” and “objective” realities
could now be reframed as a contrast within the subjective field of ex-
perience itself—as the felt contrast between subjective and intersub-
jective phenomena.

The sciences are commonly thought to aim at clear knowledge of
an objective world utterly independent of awareness or subjectivity.
Considered experientially, however, the scientific method enables
the achievement of greater intersubjectivity, greater knowledge of
that which is or can be experienced by many different selves or sub-
jects. The striving for objectivity is thus understood, phenom-
enologically, as a striving to achieve greater consensus, greater
agreement or consonance among a plurality of subjects, rather than
as an attempt to avoid subjectivity altogether. The pure “objective
reality” commonly assumed by modern science, far from being the
concrete basis underlying all experience, was, according to Husserl,
a theoretical construction, an unwarranted idealization of intersub-

jective experience.°

Philosophy on the Way to Ecology 39

The “real world” in which we find ourselves, then—the very
world our sciences strive to fathom—is not a sheer “object,” not a
fixed and finished “datum” from which all subjects and subjective
qualities could be pared away, but is rather an intertwined matrix of
sensations and perceptions, a collective field of experience lived
through from many different angles. The mutual inscription of oth-
ers in my experience, and (as I must assume) of myself in their ex-
periences, effects the interweaving of our individual phenomenal
fields into a single, ever-shifting fabric, a single phenomenal world or
“reality.”

And yet, as we know from our everyday experience, the phenom-
enal world is remarkably stable and solid; we are able to count on it
in so many ways, and we take for granted much of its structure and
character. This experienced solidity is precisely sustained by the
continual encounter with others, with other embodied subjects,
other centers of experience. The encounter with other perceivers
continually assures me that there is more to any thing, or to the
world, than I myself can perceive at any moment. Besides that which
I directly see of a particular oak tree or building, I know or intuit
that there are also those facets of the oak or building that are visible
to the other perceivers that I see. I sense that that tree is much
more than what I directly see of it, since it is also what the others
whom I see perceive of it; I sense that as a perceivable presence it al-
ready existed before I came to look at it, and indeed that it will not
dissipate when I turn away from it, since it remains an experience
for others—not just for other persons, but (as we shall see later in
this chapter) for other sentient organisms, for the birds that nest in
its branches and for the insects that move along its bark, and even, fi-
nally, for the sensitive cells and tissues of the oak itself, quietly
drinking sunlight through its leaves. It is this informing of my per-
ceptions by the evident perceptions and sensations of other bodily
entities that establishes, for me, the relative solidity and stability of
the world.

40 ‘THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

The Life-world

Although Husserl at first wrote of the nonmaterial, mental character
of experienced reality, his growing recognition of intersubjective ex-
perience, and of the body’s importance for such experience, ulti-
mately led him to recognize a more primary, corporeal dimension,
midway between the transcendental “consciousness” of his earlier
analyses and the utterly objective “matter” assumed by the natural
sciences. This was the intersubjective world of life, the Lebenswelt,
or “life-world.”

The life-world is the world of our immediately lived experience,
as we live it, prior to all our thoughts about it. It is that which is pres-
ent to us in our everyday tasks and enjoyments—reality as it engages
us before being analyzed by our theories and our science. The life-
world is the world that we count on without necessarily paying it
much attention, the world of the clouds overhead and the ground
underfoot, of getting out of bed and preparing food and turning on
the tap for water. Easily overlooked, this primordial world is always
already there when we begin to reflect or philosophize. It is not a
private, but a collective, dimension—the common field of our lives
and the other lives with which ours are entwined—and yet it is pro-
foundly ambiguous and indeterminate, since our experience of this
field is always relative to our situation within it. The life-world is
thus the world as we organically experience it in its enigmatic multi-
plicity and open-endedness, prior to conceptually freezing it into a
static space of “facts”’—prior, indeed, to conceptualizing it in any
complete fashion. All of our concepts and representations, scientific
and otherwise, necessarily draw nourishment from this indetermi-
nate realm, as the physicist analyzing data is still nourished by the
air that she is breathing, by the feel of the chair that supports her
and the light flooding in through the window, without her being par-
ticularly conscious of these participations.

The life-world is thus peripherally present in any thought or ac-
tivity we undertake. Yet whenever we attempt to explain this world
conceptually, we seem to forget our active participation within it.
Striving to represent the world, we inevitably forfeit its direct pres-

Philosophy on the Way to Ecology 41

ence. It was Husserl’s genius to realize that the assumption of objec-
tivity had led to an almost total eclipse of the life-world in the mod-
ern era, to a nearly complete forgetting of this living dimension in
which all of our endeavors are rooted. In their striving to attain a
finished blueprint of the world, the sciences had become frightfully
estranged from our direct human experience. Their many special-
ized and technical discourses had lost any obvious relevance to the
sensuous world of our ordinary engagements. The consequent im-
poverishment of language, the loss of a common discourse tuned to
the qualitative nuances of living experience, was leading, Husserl
felt, to a clear crisis in European civilization. Oblivious to the quality-
laden life-world upon which they themselves depend for their own
meaning and existence, the Western sciences, and the technologies
that accompany them, were beginning to blindly overrun the experi-
ential world—even, in their errancy, threatening to obliterate the
world-of-life entirely.®

IT SHOULD BE EVIDENT THAT THE LIFE-WORLD MAY BE QUITE
different for different cultures. The world that a people experiences
and comes to count on is deeply influenced by the ways they live and
engage that world. The members of any given culture necessarily
inhabit an experienced world very different from that of another
culture with a very different language and way of life. Even the sci-
entifically disclosed “objective universe” of contemporary Western
civilization cannot genuinely be separated from the particular insti-
tutions, technologies, and ways of life endemic to this society since
the seventeenth century.

If the worlds experienced by humans are so diverse, how much
more diverse, still, must be the life-worlds of other animals—of
wolves, or owls, or a community of bees! And yet, despite this mul-
tiplicity, it would seem that there are basic structures of the life-
world that are shared, elements that are common to different
cultures and even, we may suspect, to different species. Husserl’s
writings seem to suggest that the life-world has various layers, that
underneath the layer of the diverse cultural life-worlds there reposes
a deeper, more unitary life-world, always already there beneath all
our cultural acquisitions, a vast and continually overlooked dimen-

42 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

sion of experience that nevertheless supports and sustains all our di-
verse and discontinuous worldviews.

Husserl sheds light on this most primordial, most deeply inter-
subjective dimension of the life-world in a series of notes written in
1934. The notes describe a set of phenomenological investigations
into the contemporary understanding of space. Underneath the
modern, scientific conception of space as a mathematically infinite
and homogenous void, Husser! discloses the experienced spatiality
of the earth itself. The encompassing earth, he suggests, provides
the most immediate, bodily awareness of space, from which all later
conceptions of space are derived.’ While according to contemporary
physics the earth is but one celestial body among many others “in”
space, phenomenologically considered all bodies (including our
own) are first located relative to the ground of the earth, whereas the
earth itself is not “in” space, since it is earth that, from the first, pro-
vides space. To our most immediate sensorial experience, “bodies
are given as having the sense of being earthly bodies, and space is
given as having the sense of being earth-space.”® Further, while con-
temporary science maintains that “in reality” the earth is in motion
(around its own axis, and around the sun), Husserl maintains that
the very concepts of “motion” and “rest” derive all their meaning
from our primary, bodily experience of being in motion or at rest
relative to the “absolute” rest of the “earth-basis.”

Husserl’s notes on these matters were found in an envelope on
which he had written a few summary words: “Overthrow of the
Copernican Theory ...The original ark, earth, does not move.”?
Such a remarkable assertion illustrates well the radical nature of
Husserl’s thought. He suggests in these notes that there is a pro-
found instability in the scientific worldview, resulting from the con-
tinual clash between our scientific convictions and our spontaneous
experience. After the investigations of Copernicus, Kepler, and
Galileo, the sun came to be conceived as the center of the phenome-
nal world. Yet this conception simply did not agree with our sponta-
neous sensory perception, which remained the experience of a
radiant orb traversing the sky of a stable earth. A profound schism
was thus brought about between our intellectual convictions and the
most basic conviction of our senses, between our mental concepts
and our bodily percepts. (Descartes’s philosophical disjunction of

Philosophy on the Way to Ecology 43

the mind from the body was surely prompted by this already exist-
ing state of affairs—it was necessary, for the maintenance of the new,
Copernican worldview, that the rational intellect hold itself apart
from the experiencing body.) Nevertheless, our very words have
continued to betray the intellect and to prevent the clean ascendancy
of the Copernican system: we still say “the sun rises” and “the sun
sets” whether we are farmers or physicists. It is in this sense, writing
from the perspective of the experiencing body, that Husserl is able to
claim that earth, “the original ark,” does not move.

Finally, Husserl seems to suggest that the earth lies at the heart of
our notions of time as well as of space. He writes of the earth as our
“primitive home” and our “primitive history.” Every unique cul-
tural history is but an episode in this larger story; every culturally
constructed notion of time presupposes our deep history as carnal
beings present to a single earth.!°

The earth is thus, for Husserl, the secret depth of the life-world.
It is the most unfathomable region of experience, an enigma that ex-
ceeds the structurations of any particular culture or language. In his
words, the earth is the encompassing “ark of the world,” the com-
mon “root basis” of all relative life-worlds. Husserl’s late insights
into the importance of the earth for all human cognition were, as we
shall see, to have profound implications for the subsequent unfold-
ing of phenomenological philosophy.

EDMUND HUSSERL’S WORK WAS IN NO SENSE A REJECTION OF SCI-
ence. It was a plea that science, for its own integrity and meaning-
fulness, must acknowledge that it is rooted in the same world that we
all engage in our everyday lives and with our unaided senses—that,
for all its technological refinements, quantitative science remains an
expression of, and hence must be guided by, the qualitative world
of our common experience. The true task of phenomenology, as
Husserl saw it at the end of his career, lay in the careful demonstra-
tion of the manner in which every theoretical and scientific practice
grows out of and remains supported by the forgotten ground of our
directly felt and lived experience, and has value and meaning only in
reference to this primordial and open realm.

Originally an attempt to certify theoretical awareness by placing

44 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

itona firm footing, Husserl’s project culminated in the still ongoing
attempt to rejuvenate the full-blooded world of our sensorial exper?-
ence, and, consequently, in the dawning recognition of Earth as the
forgotten basis of all our awareness.

I now turn to the work of the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-
Ponty, in order to show how Husserl’s legacy was taken up and
transformed in a manner that endowed this philosophy with a par-
ticular power and relevance for the ecological questions that now
confront us.

PART II: MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY
AND THE PARTICIPATORY NATURE OF PERCEPTION

Maurice Merleau-Ponty set out to radicalize Husserl’s phenomenol-
ogy, both by clarifying the inconsistencies lodged in this philosophy
by Husserl’s own ambivalences, and further, by disclosing a more
eloquent way of speaking, a style of language which, by virtue of its
fluidity, its carnal resonance, and its careful avoidance of abstract
terms, might itself draw us into the sensuous depths of the life-
world.

The Mindful Life of the Body

We have seen, for instance, that the physical body came to play an
increasingly important role in Husserl’s philosophy. Only by ac-
knowledging the. embodied nature of the experiencing self was
Husserl able to avoid the pitfalls of solipsism. It is as visible, animate
bodies that other selves or subjects make themselves evident in my
subjective experience, and it is only as a body that I am visible and
sensible to others. The body is precisely my insertion in the com-
mon, or intersubjective, field of experience.

Nevertheless, the body remained a mere appearance, albeit a

Philosophy on the Way to Ecology 45

unique and pivotal one, in Husserl’s thought. The body was, to be
sure, the very locus of the experiencing subject, or self, in the phe-
nomenal world—in the manifold of appearances—but the self was
still affirmed, by Husserl, as a transcendental ego, ultimately separa-
ble from the phenomena (including the body) that it posits and pon-
ders. Despite his growing recognition of the living body’s centrality
in all experience, and despite his disclosure of the thoroughly incar-
nate, intersubjective realm of our preconceptual life, Husserl was
unable to drop the transcendental, idealist aspirations of his early
philosophy.

It is precisely this lingering assumption of a self-subsistent, dis-
embodied, transcendental ego that Merleau-Ponty rejects. If this
body is my very presence in the world, if it is the body that alone en-
ables me to enter into relations with other presences, if without these
eyes, this voice, or these hands I would be unable to see, to taste, and
to touch things, or to be touched by them—if without this body, in
other words, there would be no possibility of experience—then the
body itself is the true subject of experience. Merleau-Ponty begins,
then, by identifying the subject—the experiencing “self” —with the
bodily organism.

It is indeed a radical move. Most of us are accustomed to consider
the self, our innermost essence, as something incorporeal. Yet con-
sider: Without this body, without this tongue or these ears, you
could neither speak nor hear another’s voice. Nor could you have
anything to speak about, or even to reflect on, or to think, since with-
out any contact, any encounter, without any glimmer of sensory ex-
perience, there could be nothing to question or to know. The living
body is thus the very possibility of contact, not just with others but
with oneself—the very possibility of reflection, of thought, of
knowledge. The common notion of the experiencing self, or mind,
as an immaterial phantom ultimately independent of the body can
only be a mirage: Merleau-Ponty invites us to recognize, at the heart
of even our most abstract cogitations, the sensuous and sentient life
of the body itself.

This breathing body, as it experiences and inhabits the world, is
very different from that objectified body diagrammed in physiology
textbooks, with its separable “systems” (the circulatory system, the
digestive system, the respiratory system, etc.) laid bare on each page.

46 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

The body I here speak of is very different from the body we have
been taught to see and even to feel, very different, finally, from that
complex machine whose broken parts or stuck systems are diag-
nosed by our medical doctors and “repaired” by our medical tech-
nologies. Underneath the anatomized and mechanical body that we
have learned to conceive, prior indeed to all our conceptions, dwells
the body as it actually experiences things, this poised and animate
power that initiates all our projects and suffers all our passions.

The living, attentive body—which Merleau-Ponty called the
“body subject”—is this very being that, pondering a moment ago,
suddenly took up this pen and scribbled these thoughts. It is the very
power I have to look and to see things, or to turn away and look else-
where, the ability to cry and to laugh, or to howl at night with
the wolves, to find and gather food whether in a forest or a market,
the power to walk upon the ground and to imbibe the swirling air.
Yet “I” do not deploy these powers like a commander piloting a ship,
for I am, in my depths, indistinguishable from them, as my sadness
is indistinguishable from a certain heaviness of my bodily limbs, or
as my delight is only artificially separable from the widening of my
eyes, from the bounce in my step and the heightened sensitivity of
my skin. Indeed, facial expressions, gestures, and spontaneous utter-
ances like sighs and cries seem to immediately incarnate feelings,
moods, and desires without “my” being able to say which came
first—the corporeal gesture or its purportedly “immaterial” coun-
terpart.

To acknowledge that “I am this body” is not to reduce the mys-
tery of my yearnings and fluid thoughts to a set of mechanisms, or
my “self” to a determinate robot. Rather it is to affirm the uncanni-
ness of this physical form. It is not to lock up awareness within the
density of a closed and bounded object, for as we shall see, the
boundaries of a living body are open and indeterminate; more
like membranes than barriers, they define a surface of metamorpho-
sis and exchange. The breathing, sensing body draws its sustenance
and its very substance from the soils, plants, and elements that sur-
round it; it continually contributes itself, in turn, to the air, to the

_composting earth, to the nourishment of insects and oak trees and
squirrels, ceaselessly spreading out of itself as well as breathing the
world into itself, so that it is very difficult to discern, at any moment,

Philosophy on the Way to Ecology 47

precisely where this living body begins and where it ends. Consid-
ered phenomenologically—that is, as we actually experience and live
it—the body is a creative, shape-shifting entity. Certainly, it has its
finite character and style, its unique textures and temperaments that
distinguish it from other bodies; yet these mortal limits in no way
close me off from the things around me or render my relations to
them wholly predictable and determinate. On the contrary, my finite
bodily presence alone is what enables me to freely engage the things
around me, to choose to affiliate with certain persons or places, to in-
sinuate myself in other lives. Far from restricting my access to
things and to the world, the body is my very means of entering into
relation with all things.

To be sure, by disclosing the body itself as the very subject of
awareness, Merleau-Ponty demolishes any hope that philosophy
might eventually provide a complete picture of reality (for any such
total account of “what is” requires a mind or consciousness that
stands somehow outside of existence, whether to compile the ac-
count or, finally, to receive and comprehend it). Yet by this same
move he opens, at last, the possibility of a truly authentic phenome-
nology, a philosophy which would strive, not to explain the world as
if from outside, but to give voice to the world from our experienced
situation within it, recalling us to our participation in the here-and-
now, rejuvenating our sense of wonder at the fathomless things,
events and powers that surround us on every hand.!!

ULTIMATELY, TO ACKNOWLEDGE THE LIFE OF THE BODY, AND TO
affirm our solidarity with this physical form, is to acknowledge our
existence as one of the earth’s animals, and so to remember and
rejuvenate the organic basis of our thoughts and our intelligence.
According to the central current of the Western philosophical tradi-
tion, from its source in ancient Athens up until the present moment,
human beings alone are possessed of an incorporeal intellect, a “ra-
tional soul” or mind which, by virtue of its affinity with an eternal or
divine dimension outside the bodily world, sets us radically apart
from, or above, all other forms of life. In Aristotle’s writings, for in-
stance, while plants are endowed with a vegetal soul (which enables
nourishment, growth, and reproduction), and while animals possess,

48 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

in addition to the vegetal soul, an animal soul (which provides sensa-
tion and locomotion), these souls remain inseparable from the
earthly world of generation and decay. Humans, however, possess
along with these other souls a rational soul, or intellect, which alone
provides access to the less corruptible spheres and has affinities with
the divine “Unmoved Mover” himself. In Descartes’s hands, two
thousand years later, this hierarchical continuum of living forms,
commonly called “the Great Chain of Being,” was polarized into a
thorough dichotomy between mechanical, unthinking matter (in-
cluding all minerals, plants, and animals, as well as the human body)
and pure, thinking mind (the exclusive province of humans and
God). Since humans alone are a mixture of extended matter and
thinking mind, we alone are able to feel and to experience our body’s
mechanical sensations. Meanwhile, all other organisms, consisting
solely of extended matter, are in truth nothing more than automa-
tons, incapable of actual experience, unable to feel pleasure or suffer
pain. Hence, we humans need have no scruples about manipulating,
exploiting, or experimenting upon other animals in any manner we
see fit.

Curiously, such arguments for human specialness have regularly
been utilized by human groups to justify the exploitation not just of
other organisms, but of other humans as well (other nations, other
races, or simply the “other” sex); armed with such arguments, one
had only to demonstrate that these others were not fully human, or
were “closer to the animals,” in order to establish one’s right of do-
minion. According to Aristotle, for example, women are deficient in
the rational soul, and hence “the relation of male to female is natu-
rally that of the superior to the inferior—of the ruling to the
ruled.”!? Such justifications for social exploitation draw their force
from the prior hierarchicalization of the natural landscape, from
that hierarchical ordering that locates “humans,” by virtue of our in-
corporeal intellect, above and apart from all other, “merely corpo-
real,” entities.

Such hierarchies are wrecked by any phenomenology that takes
seriously our immediate sensory experience. For our senses disclose
to us a wild-flowering proliferation of entities and elements, in
which humans are thoroughly immersed. While this diversity of
sensuous forms certainly displays some sort of reckless order, we

Philosophy on the Way to Ecology 49

find ourselves in the midst of, rather than on top of, this order. We
may cast our gaze downward to watch the field mice and the insects
that creep along the bending grasses, or to glimpse the snakes that
slither into hollows deep underfoot, yet, at the same moment, hawks
soaring on great winds gaze down upon our endeavors. Melodious
feathered beings flit like phantoms among the high branches of the
trees, while other animate powers, known only by their traces, move
within the hidden depths of the forest. In the waters that surge in
waves against the distant edge of the land, still stranger powers,
multihued and silent, move in crowds among alien forests of coral
and stone. ... Does the human intellect, or “reason,” really spring
us free from our inherence in the depths of this wild proliferation of
forms? Or on the contrary, is the human intellect rooted in, and secretly
borne by, our forgotten contact with the multiple nonhuman shapes that
surround us?

The Body's Silent Conversation with Things

For Merleau-Ponty, all of the creativity and free-ranging mobility
that we have come to associate with the human intellect is, in truth,
an elaboration, or recapitulation, of a profound creativity already
underway at the most immediate level of sensory perception. The
sensing body is not a programmed machine but an active and open
form, continually improvising its relation to things and to the world.
The body’s actions and engagements are never wholly determinate,
since they must ceaselessly adjust themselves to a world and a terrain
that is itself continually shifting. If the body were truly a set of
closed or predetermined mechanisms, it could never come into gen-
uine contact with anything outside of itself, could never perceive
anything really new, could never be genuinely startled or surprised.
All of its experiences, and all its responses, would already have been
anticipated from the beginning, already programmed, as it were,
into the machine. But could we even, then, call them experiences?
For is not experience, or more precisely, perception, the constant
thwarting of such closure?

50 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

Consider a spider weaving its web, for instance, and the assump-
tion still held by many scientists that the behavior of such a diminu-
tive creature is thoroughly “programmed in its genes.” Certainly,
the spider has received a rich genetic inheritance from its parents
and its predecessors. Whatever “instructions,” however, are en-
folded within the living genome, they can hardly predict the specif-
ics of the microterrain within which the spider may find itself at
any particular moment. They could hardly have determined in ad-
vance the exact distances between the cave wall and the branch that
the spider is now employing as an anchorage point for her current
web, or the exact strength of the monsoon rains that make web-spin-
ning a bit more difficult on this evening. And so the genome could
not explicitly have commanded the order of every flexion and ex-
tension of her various limbs as she weaves this web into its place.
However complex are the inherited “programs,” patterns, or predis-
positions, they must still be adapted to the immediate situation in
which the spider finds itself. However determinate one’s genetic in-
heritance, it must still, as it were, be woven into the present, an ac-
tivity that necessarily involves both a receptivity to the specific
shapes and textures of that present and a spontaneous creativity in
adjusting oneself (and one’s inheritance) to those contours. It is this
open activity, this dynamic blend of receptivity and creativity by
which every animate organism necessarily orients itself to the world
(and orients the world around itself), that we speak of by the term
“perception.”

BUT LET US NOW PONDER THE EVENT OF PERCEPTION AS WE OUR-
selves experience and live it. The human body with its various
predilections is, to be sure, our own inheritance, our own rootedness
in an evolutionary history and a particular ancestry. Yet it is also our
insertion in a world that exceeds our grasp in every direction, our
means of contact with things and lives that are still unfolding, open
and indeterminate, all around us. Indeed, from the perspective of
my bodily senses, there is no thing that appears as a completely de-
terminate or finished object. Each thing, each entity that my body
sees, presents some face or facet of itself to my gaze while withhold-
ing other aspects from view.

Philosophy on the Way to Ecology 51

The clay bowl resting on the table in front of me meets my eyes
with its curved and grainy surface. Yet I can only see one side of that
surface—the other side of the bowl is invisible, hidden by the side
that faces me. In order to view that other side, I must pick up the
bowl and turn it around in my hands, or else walk around the
wooden table. Yet, having done so, I can no longer see the first side
of the bowl. Surely I know that it still exists; I can even fee/ the pres-
ence of that aspect which the bowl now presents to the lamp on the
far side of the table. Yet I myself am simply unable to see the whole
of this bowl all at once.

Moreover, while examining its outer surface I have caught only a
glimpse of the smooth and finely glazed inside of the bowl. When I
stand up to look down into that interior, which gleams with curved
reflections from the skylight overhead, I can no longer see the
unglazed outer surface. This earthen vessel thus reveals aspects of
its presence to me only by withholding other aspects of itself for fur-
ther exploration. There can be no question of ever totally exhaust-
ing the presence of the bowl with my perception; its very existence
as a bowl ensures that there are dimensions wholly inaccessible to
me—most obviously the patterns hidden between its glazed and
unglazed surfaces, the interior density of its clay body. If I break it
into pieces, in hopes of discovering these interior patterns or the del-
icate structure of its molecular dimensions, I will have destroyed its
integrity as a bowl; .far from coming to know it completely, I will
simply have wrecked any possibility of coming to know it further,
having traded the relation between myself and the bow] for a rela-
tion to a collection of fragments.

Even a single facet of this bowl resists being plumbed by my gaze
once and for all. For, like myself, the bowl is a temporal being, an en-
tity shifting and changing in time, although the rhythm of its
changes may be far slower than my own. Each time that I return to
gaze at the outward surface of the bowl, my eyes and my mood have
shifted, however slightly; informed by my previous encounters with
the bowl, my senses now more attuned to its substance, I continually
discover new and unexpected aspects. But this is in part because the
bowl has changed as well, as a result perhaps of shifts in the light
pouring through the window, of dust and of wear—as a result, even,
of my own earlier explorations. When I look now at its unglazed

§2 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

outer surface, where before I had seen a homogeneous expanse of
bright grey, I now see various faint smudges, some of them ancient
and some of them recent—the record of the many hands that have
held it through the seasons. Each spot invites me to peer at it more
closely, to distinguish that smudge from the others, to try to discern
which are the traces of my own hands, and which are of hands larger,
or more delicate, and which may be the trace even of those hands
that first threw this fine and useful bowl on some potter’s wheel
years ago.

As this bowl awaits the further involvement of my eyes and my
hands, so also every other object in this room invites the participa-
tion of my senses—the wooden dresser with its stuffed drawers, the
plants on the windowsill quietly turning toward the sun, the indi-
vidual glasses and dishes stashed above the old sink with its hidden
and clattering pipes, and the ancient pinewood table that I now write
upon, its coffee stains and countless knife scratches cutting across
the curving grain of the wood, and those pens and pencils that
beckon to my fingers, and the books that call to me from the shelves,
one always asking to be read more deeply, another chanting to me of
my childhood, another merely waiting, coldly it seems, to be re-
turned to the library. Like the bowl, each presence presents some
facet that catches my eye while the rest of it lies hidden behind
the horizon of my current position, each one inviting me to focus my
senses upon it, to let the other objects fall into the background as I
enter into its particular depth. When my body thus responds to the
mute solicitation of another being, that being responds in turn, dis-
closing to my senses some new aspect or dimension that in turn in-
vites further exploration. By this process my sensing body gradually
attunes itself to the style of this other presence—to the way of this
stone, or tree, or table—as the other seems to adjust itself to my own
style and sensitivity. In this manner the simplest thing may become
a world for me, as, conversely, the thing or being comes to take its
place more deeply in my world.

Perception, in Merleau-Ponty’s work, is precisely this reciprocity,
the ongoing interchange between my body and the entities that sur-
round it. Itis asort of silent conversation that I carry on with things,
a continuous dialogue that unfolds far below my verbal awareness—
and often, even, independent of my verbal awareness, as when my

Philosophy on the Way to Ecology 53

hand readily navigates the space between these scribed pages and the
coffee cup across the table without my having to think about it, or
when my legs, hiking, continually attune and adjust themselves to
the varying steepness of the mountain slopes behind this house
without my verbal consciousness needing to direct those adjust-
ments. Whenever I quiet the persistent chatter of words within my
head, I find this silent or wordless dance always already going on—
this improvised duet between my animal body and the fluid, breath-
ing landscape that it inhabits.

The Animateness of the Perceptual world

Where does perception originate? I cannot say truthfully that my
perception of a particular wildflower, with its color and its fragrance,
is determined or “caused” entirely by the flower—since other per-
sons may experience a somewhat different fragrance, as even I, in a
different moment or mood, may see the color differently, and indeed
since any bumblebee that alights on that blossom will surely have a
very different perception of it than I do. But neither can I say truth-
fully that my perception is “caused” solely by myself—by my phys-
iological or neural organization—or that it exists entirely “in my
head.” For without the actual existence of this other entity, of this
flower rooted not in my brain but in the soil of the earth, there would
be no fragrant and colorful perception at all, neither for myself nor
for any others, whether human or insect.

Neither the perceiver nor the perceived, then, is wholly passive in
the event of perception:

[M]y gaze pairs off with colour, and my hand with hardness and
softness, and in this transaction between the subject of sensation
and the sensible it cannot be held that one acts while the other
suffers the action, or that one confers significance on the other.
Apart from the probing of my eye or my hand, and before my
body synchronizes with it, the sensible is nothing but a vague
beckoning.!3

54 ‘THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

There is thus a solicitation of my body by the sensible, and a ques-
tioning of the sensible by my body, a reciprocal encroachment:

... [a sensible quality, like the color blue,] which is on the point
of being felt sets a kind of muddled problem for my body to solve.
I must find the attitude which will provide it with the means of
becoming determinate, of showing up as blue; I must find the
reply to a question which is obscurely expressed. And yet I do so
only when I am invited by it; my attitude is never sufficient to
make me really see blue or really touch a hard surface. The sensi-
ble gives back to me what I lent to it, but this is only what I took
from it in the first place. As I contemplate the blue of the sky...
I abandon myself to it and plunge into this mystery, it ‘thinks it-
self within me,’ Iam thesky itself as it is drawn together and uni-
fied, and as it begins to exist for itself; my consciousness is

saturated with this limitless blue. . . .'4

In the act of perception, in other words, I enter into a sympa-
thetic relation with the perceived, which is possible only because
neither my body nor the sensible exists outside the flux of time, and
so each has its own dynamism, its own pulsation and style. Percep-
tion, in this sense, is an attunement or synchronization between my
own rhythms and the rhythms of the things themselves, their own
tones and textures:

...in so far as my hand knows hardness and softness, and my
gaze knows the moon’s light, it is as a certain way of linking up
with the phenomenon and communicating with it. Hardness and
softness, roughness and smoothness, moonlight and sunlight,
present themselves in our recollection not pre-eminently as sen-
sory contents but as certain kinds of symbioses, certain ways the
outside has of invading us and certain wavs we have of meeting
this invasion... .5

In this ceaseless dance between the carnal subject and its world,
at one moment the body leads, at another the things. In one lumi-
nous passage, which suggests the profound intimacy of the body’s

Philosophy on the Way to Ecology 55

preconceptual relation to the sensible things or powers that sur-
round it, Merleau-Ponty writes of perception in terms of an almost
magical invocation enacted by the body, and the body’s subsequent
“possession” by the perceived:

The relations of sentient to sensible are comparable with those of
the sleeper to his slumber: sleep suddenly comes when a certain
voluntary attitude suddenly receives from outside the confirma-
tion for which it was waiting. I am breathing deeply and slowly in
order to summon sleep, and suddenly it is as if my mouth were
connected to some great lung outside myself which alternately
calls forth and forces back my breath. A certain rhythm of res-
piration, which a moment ago I voluntarily maintained, now
becomes my very being, and sleep, until now aimed at... , sud-
denly becomes my situation. In the same way I give ear, or look,
in the expectation of a sensation, and suddenly the sensible takes
possession of my ear or my gaze, and I surrender a part of my
body, even my whole body, to this particular manner of vibrating
and filling space known as blue or red... .!°

What are we to make of these strange ways of speaking? In these
and other passages throughout Merleau-Ponty’s major work, Phe-
nomenology of Perception, the sensible thing, commonly considered
by our philosophical tradition to be passive and inert, is consistently
described in the active voice: the sensible “beckons to me,” “sets a
problem for my body to solve,” “responds” to my summons and
“takes possession of my senses,” and even “thinks itself within me.”
The sensible world, in other words, is described as active, animate,
and, in some curious manner, alive: it is not I, when asleep, who
breathes, but “some great lung outside myself which alternately calls
forth and forces back my breath”; a color is “a manner of vibrating
and filling space”; a thing is an “entity,” an “Other” which at one
moment “holds itself aloof from us” and at another moment actively
“expresses itself” directly to our senses, so that we may ultimately
describe perception as a mutual interaction, an intercourse, “a
coition, so to speak, of my body with things.”!”

Are such animistic turns of phrase to be attributed simply to
some sort of poetic license that Merleau-Ponty has introduced into

” 6

56 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

his philosophy? Are they evidence, that is, merely of an idiosyncratic
style of writing, as some critics have asserted? J think not. Merleau-
Ponty writes of the perceived things as entities, of sensible qualities
as powers, and of the sensible itself as a field of animate presences,
in order to acknowledge and underscore their active, dynamic con-
tribution to perceptual experience. To describe the animate life of
particular things is simply the most precise and parsimonious way to
articulate the things as we spontaneously experience them, prior to all
our conceptualizations and definitions.

Our most immediate experience of things, according to Merleau-
Ponty, is necessarily an experience of reciprocal encounter—of
tension, communication, and commingling. From within the depths
of this encounter, we know the thing or phenomenon only as our in-
terlocutor—as a dynamic presence that confronts us and draws us
into relation. We conceptually immobilize or objectify the phenom-
enon only by mentally absenting ourselves from this relation, by
forgetting or repressing our sensuous involvement. To define an-
other being as an inert or passive object is to deny its ability to ac-
tively engage us and to provoke our senses; we thus block our
perceptual reciprocity with that being. By linguistically defining the
surrounding world as a determinate set of objects, we cut our con-
scious, speaking selves off from the spontaneous life of our sensing
bodies.

If, on the other hand, we wish to describe a particular phenome-
non without repressing our direct experience, then we cannot avoid
speaking of the phenomenon as an active, animate entity with which
we find ourselves engaged. It is for this reason that Merleau-Ponty
so consistently uses the active voice to describe things, qualities, and
even the enveloping world itself. To the sensing body, no thing pre-
sents itself as utterly passive or inert. Only by affirming the animate-
ness of perceived things do we allow our words to emerge directly from
the depths of our ongoing reciprocity with the world.

Philosophy on the Way to Ecology 57

Perception As Participation

If we wish to choose a single term to characterize the event of per-
ception, as it is disclosed by phenomenological attention, we may
borrow the term “participation,” used by the early French anthro-
pologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl. The brilliant forerunner of today’s
“cognitive” and “symbolic” schools of anthropology, Lévy-Bruhl
used the word “participation” to characterize the animistic logic of
indigenous, oral peoples—for whom ostensibly “inanimate” objects
like stones or mountains are often thought to be alive, for whom cer-
tain names, spoken aloud, may be felt to influence at a distance the
things or beings that they name, for whom particular plants, partic-
ular animals, particular places and persons and powers may all be
felt to participate in one another’s existence, influencing each other
and being influenced in turn.!8

For Lévy-Bruhl participation was thus a perceived relation be-
tween diverse phenomena; Merleau-Ponty’s work, however, sug-
gests that participation is a defining attribute of perception itself. By
asserting that perception, phenomenologically considered, is inher-
ently participatory, we mean that perception always involves, at its
most intimate level, the experience of an active interplay, or cou-
pling, between the perceiving body and that which it perceives. Prior
to all our verbal reflections, at the level of our spontaneous, sensor-
ial engagement with the world around us, we are all animists.

SOME INSIGHT INTO THE PARTICIPATORY NATURE OF PERCEPTION
may be gleaned by considering the craft of the sleight-of-hand ma-
gician. For the conjuror depends upon this active participation be-
tween the body and the world for the creation of his magic. Working,
for instance, with a silver dollar, he uses his sleights to enhance the
animation of the object, generating ambiguous gaps and lacunae in
the visible trajectory of the coin. The spectators’ eyes, already
drawn by the coin’s fluid dance across the magician’s fingers, sponta-
neously fill in those gaps with impossible events, and it is this spon-
taneous involvement of the spectators’ own senses that enables the

58 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

coin to vanish and reappear, or to pass through the magician’s hand.

After flourishing a silver dollar in my right hand, for example,
spinning it a few times to catch the audience’s attention, I may sud-
denly hide that coin behind the hand, clipping it between two fingers
so that it is no longer visible to their gaze. If, an instant later, I reach
into the air on the other side of my body with my left hand, and
bring into view another silver dollar that had been clipped behind
that hand, the audience will commonly perceive something quite
wondrous. They will not perceive that one coin has been momentar-
ily hidden while a wholly different coin, in another place, has been
brought out of hiding, although this would surely be the most obvi-
ous and rational interpretation. Rather, they will perceive that a sin-
gle coin, having vanished from my right hand, has traveled invisibly
through the air and reappeared in my left hand! For the perceiving
body does not calculate logical probabilities; it gregariously partici-
pates in the activity of the world, lending its imagination to things in
order to see them more fully. The invisible journey of the coin is con-
tributed, quite spontaneously, by the promiscuous creativity of the
senses. The magician induces us to assist in the metamorphosis of
his objects, and then startles us with what we ourselves have created!

From the magician’s, or the phenomenologist’s, perspective, that
which we call imagination is from the first an attribute of the senses
themselves; imagination is not a separate mental faculty (as we so
often assume) but is rather the way the senses themselves have of
throwing themselves beyond what is immediately given, in order to
make tentative contact with the other sides of things that we do not
sense directly, with the hidden or invisible aspects of the sensible.
And yet such sensory anticipations and projections are not arbitrary;
they regularly respond to suggestions offered by the sensible itself.
The magician, for instance, may make the magic palpable for the au-
dience by following the invisible coin’s journey with the focus of his
own eyes, and by imaginatively “feeling” the coin depart from the
one hand and arrive in the palm of the other; the audience’s senses,
responding to subtle shifts in the magician’s body as well as to the
coin, will then find the effect irresistible. In other words, it is when
the magician lets himself be captured by the magic that his audience
will be most willing to join him.

Of course, there are those few who simply will not see any magic,

Philosophy on the Way to Ecology 59

either at a performance or in the world at large; armored with count-
less explanations and analyses, they “see” only how the trick must
have been accomplished. Commonly, they will claim to have “caught
sight of the wires,” or to have seen me clandestinely “throw the coin
into the other hand” although I myself have done no such thing. En-
couraged by a cultural discourse that disdains the unpredictable and
puts a premium on detached objectivity, such persons attempt to
halt the participation of their senses in the phenomenon. Yet they
can do so only by imaginatively projecting other phenomena (wires,
or threads, or mirrors), or by looking away.

In truth, since the act of perception is always open-ended and un-
finished, we are never wholly locked into any particular instance of
participation. As the spectator can turn away from the magician’s
magic, we are always somewhat free to break our participation with
any particular phenomenon. It is thus that, caught up in contempla-
tion of a blade of grass, I may nevertheless shift my attention to the
grove of trees nearby, or my focus may suddenly be usurped by a fly
that lands upon my nose. Similarly, we may readily break our fasci-
nation with a television commercial in order to notice how it plays
upon our emotions and our desires. But we suspend this participa-
tion only on behalf of other participations already going on—with
the other persons in the room, with the hard and uncomfortable
chair on which we sit, with our own thoughts and analyses. We al-
ways retain the ability to alter or suspend any particular instance
of participation. Yet we can never suspend the flux of participation
itself.

synaesthesia—The Fusion of the Senses

Until now we have spoken of perception in primarily visual terms.
Yet perception involves touching as well, and hearing and smelling
and tasting. By the term “perception” we mean the concerted activ-
ity of all the body’s senses as they function and flourish together. In-
deed, if I attend closely to my nonverbal experience of the shifting

60 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

landscape that surrounds me, I must acknowledge that the so-called
separate senses are thoroughly blended with one another, and it is
only after the fact that I am able to step back and isolate the specific
contributions of my eyes, my ears, and my skin. As soon as I attempt
to distinguish the share of any one sense from that of the others, I
inevitably sever the full participation of my sensing body with the
sensuous terrain.

When, for instance, I perceive the wind surging through the
branches of an aspen tree, I am unable, at first, to distinguish the
sight of those trembling leaves from their delicate whispering. My
muscles, too, feel the torsion as those branches bend, ever so slightly,
in the surge, and this imbues the encounter with a certain tactile ten-
sion. The encounter is influenced, as well, by the fresh smell of the
autumn wind, and even by the taste of an apple that still lingers on
my tongue.

Yet already, in this brief attempt to acknowledge the contribution
of the various senses, I have had to remove myself from that “pri-
mary layer of sense experience that precedes its division among the
separate senses.”!? Although contemporary neuroscientists study
“synaesthesia”—the overlap and blending of the senses—as though
it were a rare or pathological experience to which only certain per-
sons are prone (those who report “seeing sounds,” “hearing colors,”
and the like), our primordial, preconceptual experience, as Merleau-
Ponty makes evident, is inherently synaesthetic. The intertwining of
sensory modalities seems unusual to us only to the extent that we
have become estranged from our direct experience (and hence from
our primordial contact with the entities and elements that sur-
round us):

. .. Synaesthetic perception is the rule, and we are unaware of it
only because scientific knowledge shifts the center of gravity of
experience, so that we have unlearned how to see, hear, and gen-
erally speaking, feel, in order to deduce, from our bodily organi-
zation and the world as the physicist conceives it, what we are to
see, hear, and feel.2°

Nevertheless, we still speak of “cool” or “warm” colors, of “loud”
clothing, of “hard” or “brittle” sounds. The speaking body readily

Philosophy on the Way to Ecology 61

transposes qualities from one sensory domain into another, accord-
ing to a logic we easily understand but cannot easily explain.

Many Westerners become conscious of this overlapping of the
senses only when their allegiance to the presumably impartial, ana-
lytic logic of their culture temporarily breaks down. Merleau-Ponty
discusses the effect upon European researchers of mescaline, the
psychoactive component of the peyote cactus, a plant traditionally
used in ceremonial practice by indigenous tribes in Mexico and
North America:

The influence of mescalin, by weakening the attitude of impar-
tiality and surrendering the subject to his vitality, should [if we
are correct] favor forms of synaesthetic experience. And indeed,
under mescalin, the sound of a flute gives a bluish-green colour,
[and] the tick of a metronome, in darkness, is translated as grey
patches, the spatial intervals between them corresponding to the
intervals of time between the ticks, the size of the patch to the
loudness of the tick, and its height to the pitch of the sound. A
subject under mescalin finds a piece of iron, strikes the window-
sill with it and exclaims: “This is magic”; the trees are growing
greener. ... Seen in the perspective of the objective [Cartesian]
world, with its opaque qualities, the phenomenon of synaesthetic
experience is paradoxical. . . .?!

Seen, however, from the perspective of the life-world—from the
perspective, that is, of our pretheoretical awareness—such experi-
ences are recognized as amplifications or intensifications of quite or-
dinary phenomena that are always going on.

This is not to deny that the senses are distinct modalities. It is to
assert that they are divergent modalities of a single and unitary liv-
ing body, that they are complementary powers evolved in complex
interdependence with one another. Each sense is a unique modality
of this body’s existence, yet in the activity of perception these diver-
gent modalities necessarily intercommunicate and overlap. It is thus
that a raven soaring in the distance is not, for me, a mere visual
image; as I follow it with my eyes, I inevitably feel the stretch and
flex of its wings with my own muscles, and its sudden swoop toward
the nearby trees is a visceral as well as a visual experience for me.

62 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

The raven’s loud, guttural cry, as it swerves overhead, is not circum-
scribed within a strictly audible field—it echoes through the visible,
immediately animating the visible landscape with the reckless style
or mood proper to that jet black shape. My various senses, diverging
as they do from a single, coherent body, coherently converge, as well,
in the perceived thing, just as the separate perspectives of my two
eyes converge upon the raven and convene there into a single focus.
My senses connect up with each other in the things I perceive, or
rather each perceived thing gathers my senses together in a coherent
way, and it is this that enables me to experience the thing itself as a
center of forces, as another nexus of experience, as an Other.

Hence, just as we have described perception as a dynamic partic-
ipation between my body and things, so we now discern, within the
act of perception, a participation between the various sensory sys-
tems of the body itself. Indeed, these events are not separable, for
the intertwining of my body with the things it perceives is effected
only through the interweaving of my senses, and vice versa. The rel-
ative divergence of my bodily senses (eyes in the front of the head,
ears toward the back, etc.) and their curious bifurcation (not one but
two eyes, one on each side, and similarly two ears, two nostrils, etc.),
indicates that this body is a form destined to the world; it ensures
that my body is a sort of open circuit that completes itself only in
things, in others, in the encompassing earth.

The Recuperation of the Sensuous Is the Rediscovery of the Earth

In the autumn of 1985, a strong hurricane ripped across suburban
Long Island, where I was then living as a student. For several days
afterward much of the populace was without electricity; power lines
were down, telephone lines broken, and the roads were strewn with
toppled trees. People had to walk to their jobs, and to whatever shops
were still open. We began encountering each other on the streets, “in
person” instead of by telephone. In the absence of automobiles and
their loud engines, the rhythms of crickets and birdsong became
clearly audible. Flocks were migrating south for the winter, and

Philosophy on the Way to Ecology 63

many of us found ourselves simply listening, with new and childlike
curiosity, to the ripples of song in the still-standing trees and the
fields. And at night the sky was studded with stars! Many children,
their eyes no longer blocked by the glare of houselights and street-
lamps, saw the Milky Way for the first time, and were astonished.
For those few days and nights our town became a community aware
of its place in an encompassing cosmos. Even our noses seemed to
come awake, the fresh smells from the ocean somehow more vibrant
and salty. The breakdown of our technologies had forced a return to
our senses, and hence to the natural landscape in which those senses
are so profoundly embedded. We suddenly found ourselves inhabit-
ing a sensuous world that had been waiting, for years, at the very
fringe of our awareness, an intimate terrain infused by birdsong, salt
spray, and the light of stars.

AS WE REACQUAINT OURSELVES WITH OUR BREATHING BODIES,
then the perceived world itself begins to shift and transform. When
we begin to consciously frequent the wordless dimension of our sen-
sory participations, certain phenomena that have habitually com-
manded our focus begin to lose their distinctive fascination and to
slip toward the background, while hitherto unnoticed or overlooked
presences begin to stand forth from the periphery and to engage
our awareness. The countless human artifacts with which we are
commonly involved—the asphalt roads, chain-link fences, telephone
wires, buildings, lightbulbs, ballpoint pens, automobiles, street signs,
plastic containers, newspapers, radios, television screens—all begin
to exhibit a common style, and so to lose some of their distinctive-
ness; meanwhile, organic entities—crows, squirrels, the trees and
wild weeds that surround our house, humming insects, streambeds,
clouds and rainfalls—all these begin to display a new vitality, each
coaxing the breathing body into a unique dance. Even boulders and
rocks seem to speak their own uncanny languages of gesture and
shadow, inviting the body and its bones into silent communica-
tion. In contact with the native forms of the earth, one’s senses are
slowly energized and awakened, combining and recombining in
ever-shifting patterns.

For these other shapes and species have coevolved, like ourselves,

64 ‘THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

with the rest of the shifting earth; their rhythms and forms are com-
posed of layers upon layers of earlier rhythms, and in engaging them
our senses are led into an inexhaustible depth that echoes that of our
own flesh. The patterns on the stream’s surface as it ripples over the
rocks, or on the bark of an elm tree, or in a cluster of weeds, are all
composed of repetitive figures that never exactly repeat themselves, of
iterated shapes to which our senses may attune themselves even
while the gradual drift and metamorphosis of those shapes draws
our awareness in unexpected and unpredictable directions.

In contrast, the mass-produced artifacts of civilization, from
milk cartons to washing machines to computers, draw our senses
into a dance that endlessly reiterates itself without variation. To the
sensing body these artifacts are, like all phenomena, animate and
even alive, but their life is profoundly constrained by the specific
“functions” for which they were built. Once our bodies master these
functions, the machine-made objects commonly teach our senses
nothing further; they are unable to surprise us, and so we must con-
tinually acquire new built objects, new technologies, the latest model
of this or that if we wish to stimulate ourselves.

Of course, our human-made artifacts inevitably retain an element
of more-than-human otherness. This unknowability, this otherness,
resides most often in the materials from which the object is made.
The tree trunk of the telephone pole, the clay of the bricks from
which the building is fashioned, the smooth metal alloy of the car
door we lean against—all these still carry, like our bodies, the tex-
tures and rhythms of a pattern that we ourselves did not devise, and
their quiet dynamism responds directly to our senses. Too often,
however, this dynamism is stifled within mass-produced structures
closed off from the rest of the earth, imprisoned within technolo-
gies that plunder the living land. The superstraight lines and right
angles of our office architecture, for instance, make our animal
senses wither even as they support the abstract intellect; the wild,
earth-born nature of the materials—the woods, clays, metals, and
stones that went into the building—are readily forgotten behind the
abstract and calculable form.”

It is thus that so much of our built environment, and so many of
the artifacts that populate it, seem sadly superfluous and dull when
we identify with our bodies and taste the world with our animal

Philosophy on the Way to Ecology 65

senses. (Of course, this is not to say that these artifacts are innocu-
ous: many of them are exceedingly loud, even blaring, for what they
lack in variation and nuance they must make up in clamorous insis-
tence, monopolizing the perceptual field.) Whenever we assume the
position and poise of the human animal—Merleau-Ponty’s body-
subject—then the entire material world itself seems to come awake
and to speak, yet organic, earth-born entities speak far more elo-
quently than the rest. Like suburbanites after a hurricane, we find
ourselves alive in a living field of powers far more expressive and di-
verse than the strictly human sphere to which we are accustomed.

SO THE RECUPERATION OF THE INCARNATE, SENSORIAL DIMENSION
of experience brings with it a recuperation of the living landscape in
which we are corporeally embedded. As we return to our senses, we
gradually discover our sensory perceptions to be simply our part of
a vast, interpenetrating webwork of perceptions and sensations
borne by countless other bodies—supported, that is, not just by our-
selves, but by icy streams tumbling down granitic slopes, by owl
wings and lichens, and by the unseen, imperturbable wind.

This intertwined web of experience is, of course, the “life-world”
to which Husserl alluded in his final writings, yet now the life-world
has been disclosed as a profoundly carnal field, as this very dimen-
sion of smells and tastes and chirping rhythms warmed by the sun
and shivering with seeds. It is, indeed, nothing other than the bio-
sphere—the matrix of earthly life in which we ourselves are embed-
ded. Yet this is not the biosphere as it is conceived by an abstract
and objectifying science, not that complex assemblage of planetary
mechanisms presumably being mapped and measured by our remote-
sensing satellites; it is, rather, the biosphere as it is experienced and
lived from within by the intelligent body—by the attentive hu-
man animal who is entirely a part of the world that he, or she, ex-
periences.

66 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

Matter as Flesh

In his final work, The Visible and the Invisible (a work interrupted by
his sudden death in 1961), Merleau-Ponty was striving for a new
way of speaking that would express this consanguinity of the human
animal and the world it inhabits. Here he writes less about “the
body” (which in his earlier work had signified primarily the human
body) and begins to write instead of the collective “Flesh,” which
signifies both our flesh and “the flesh of the world.””? By “the Flesh”
Merleau-Ponty means to indicate an elemental power that has had
no name in the entire history of Western philosophy. The Flesh is
the mysterious tissue or matrix that underlies and gives rise to both
the perceiver and the perceived as interdependent aspects of its own
spontaneous activity. It is the reciprocal presence of the sentient in
the sensible and of the sensible in the sentient, a mystery of which
we have always, at least tacitly, been aware, since we have never been
able to affirm one of these phenomena, the perceivable world or the
perceiving self, without implicitly affirming the existence of the
other. We are unable even to imagine a sensible landscape that would
not at the same time be sensed (since in imagining any landscape we
inevitably envisage it from a particular perspective, and thus impli-
cate Our Own senses, and indeed our own sentience, in that land-
scape), and are similarly unable to fully imagine a sensing self, or
sentience, that would not be situated in some field of sensed phe-
nomena.

Nevertheless, conventional scientific discourse privileges the sen-
sible field in abstraction from sensory experience, and commonly
maintains that subjective experience is “caused” by an objectifiable
set of processes in the mechanically determined field of the sensible.
Meanwhile, New Age spiritualism regularly privileges pure sen-
tience, or subjectivity, in abstraction from sensible matter, and often
maintains that material reality is itself an illusory effect caused by an
immaterial mind or spirit. Although commonly seen as opposed
world-views, both of these positions assume a qualitative difference
between the sentient and the sensed; by prioritizing one or the other,
both of these views perpetuate the distinction between human

Philosophy on the Way to Ecology 67

“subjects” and natural “objects,” and hence neither threatens the
common conception of sensible nature as a purely passive dimension
suitable for human manipulation and use. While both of these views
are unstable, each bolsters the other; by bouncing’ from one to the
other—from scientific determinism to spiritual idealism and back
again—contemporary discourse easily avoids the possibility that
both the perceiving being and the perceived being are of the same
stuff, that the perceiver and the perceived are interdependent and in
some sense even reversible aspects of a common animate element, or
Flesh, that is at once both sensible and sensitive.

We readily experience this paradox in relation to other persons;
this stranger who stands before me and is an object for my gaze sud-
denly opens his mouth and speaks to me, forcing me to acknowledge
that he is a sentient subject like myself, and that I, too, am an object
for his gaze. Each of us, in relation to the other, is both subject and
object, sensible and sentient. Why, then, might this not also be the
case in relation to another, nonhuman entity—a mountain lion, for
instance, that I unexpectedly encounter in the northern forest? In-
deed, such a meeting brings home to me even more forcefully that I
am not just a sentient subject but also a sensible object, even an edi-
ble object, in the eyes (and nose) of the other. Even an ant crawling
along my arm, visible to my eyes and tactile to my skin, displays at
the same time its own sentience, responding immediately to my
movements, even to the chemical changes of my mood. In relation to
the ant I feel myself as a dense and material object, as capricious in
my actions as the undulating earth itself. Finally, then, why might
not this “reversibility” of subject and object extend to every entity
that I experience? Once I acknowledge that my own sentience, or
subjectivity, does not preclude my visible, tactile, objective existence
for others, I find myself forced to acknowledge that any visible, tan-
gible form that meets my gaze may also be an experiencing subject,
sensitive and responsive to the beings around it, and to me.

68 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

Touching and Being Touched: The Reciprocity of the Sensuous

In order to demonstrate, empirically, his notion of the Flesh, Merleau-
Ponty provides what may be the most direct illustration of that
which we have termed “participation.” He calls attention to the
obvious but easily overlooked fact that my hand is able to touch
things only because my hand is itself a touchable thing, and thus is
entirely a part of the tactile world that it explores. Similarly, the
eyes, with which I see things, are themselves visible. With their
gleaming surfaces, their colors and hues, they are included within
the visible field that they see—they are themselves part of the
visible, like the bark of a cedar, or a piece of sandstone, or the
blue sky.

To touch the coarse skin of a tree is thus, at the same time, to ex-
perience one’s own tactility, to feel oneself touched by the tree. And
to see the world is also, at the same time, to experience oneself as vis-
ible, to feel oneself seen. Clearly, a wholly immaterial mind could
neither see things nor touch things—indeed, could not experience
anything at all. We can experience things—can touch, hear, and
taste things—only because, as bodies, we are ourselves included in
the sensible field, and have our own textures, sounds, and tastes. We
can perceive things at all only because we ourselves are entirely a
part of the sensible world that we perceive! We might as well say that
we are organs of this world, flesh of its flesh, and that the world is
perceiving itself through us.

Walking in a forest, we peer into its green and shadowed depths,
listening to the silence of the leaves, tasting the cool and fragrant air.
Yet such is the transitivity of perception, the reversibility of the
flesh, that we may suddenly feel that the trees are looking at us—we
feel ourselves exposed, watched, observed from all sides. If we dwell
in this forest for many months, or years, then our experience may
shift yet again—we may come to feel that we are a part of this forest,
consanguineous with it, and that our experience of the forest is
nothing other than the forest experiencing itself.

Such are the exchanges and metamorphoses that arise from the
simple fact that our sentient bodies are entirely continuous with the

Philosophy on the Way to Ecology 69

vast body of the land, that “the presence of the world is precisely the
presence of its flesh to my flesh.”*+

MERLEAU-PONTY’S NOTION OF THE FLESH OF THE WORLD, ALONG
with his related discoveries regarding the reciprocity of perception,
bring his work into startling consonance with the worldviews of
many indigenous, oral cultures. According to cultural anthropolo-
gist Richard Nelson, in his exhaustive study of the ecology of the
Koyukon Indians of north central Alaska:

(t]raditional Koyukon people live in a world that watches, in a
forest of eyes. A person moving through nature—however wild,
remote, even desolate the place may be—is never truly alone. The
surroundings are aware, sensate, personified. They feel. They can
be offended. And they must, at every moment, be treated with the
proper respect.?° :

Such a mode of experience, which seems so strange and confused to
our civilized ways of thinking, becomes understandable as soon as
we acknowledge, underneath our conventional assumptions, the re-
ciprocal nature of direct perception—the fact that to touch is also to
feel oneself being touched, that to see is also to feel oneself seen.
Nelson’s description suggests, as well, that such perceptual reciproc-
ity, when consciously acknowledged, may profoundly influence
one’s behavior. If the surroundings are experienced as sensate, at-
tentive, and watchful, then I must take care that my actions are
mindful and respectful, even when I am far from other humans, lest
I offend the watchful land itself.

It may be that the new “environmental ethic” toward which so
many environmental philosophers aspire—an ethic that would lead
us to respect and heed not only the lives of our fellow humans but
also the life and well-being of the rest of nature—will come into ex-
istence not primarily through the logical elucidation of new philo-
sophical principles and legislative strictures, but through a renewed
attentiveness to this perceptual dimension that underlies all our log-
ics, through a rejuvenation of our carnal, sensorial empathy with the
living land that sustains us.

70 ‘THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

Such a recuperation is, perhaps, already underway. Many indi-
viduals today experience a profound anguish that only deepens with
each report of more ancient forests cleared, of new oil spills, of the
ever-accelerating loss of species. It is an anguish that seems to come
from the earth itself, from this vast Flesh in which our own sentient
flesh is embedded. In the words of a Koyukon elder: “The country
knows. If you do wrong things to it, the whole country knows. It
feels what’s happening to it.”*°

THE INFLUENCE OF A KIND OF PERCEPTUAL RECIPROCITY UPON
oneself and one’s actions is evident as well in these words spoken by
Old Torlino, a Navajo elder, before telling part of the creation story:

I am ashamed before the earth;

I am ashamed before the heavens;

I am ashamed before the dawn;

I am ashamed before the evening twilight;

I am ashamed before the blue sky;

I am ashamed before the sun.

I am ashamed before that standing within me which speaks with me.
Some of these things are always looking at me.
I am never out of sight.

Therefore I must tell the truth.

I hold my word tight to my breast.?’

The final lines of this prayer/incantation call our attention to speak-
ing itself as a form of behavior that can be mindful or callous, truth-
ful or dishonest, in the face of a sentient cosmos. Spoken words here
are real presences, entities that may be cherished—“held tight to my
breast”—or flung carelessly into the world. These phrases from the
Navajo, like the Koyukon words before them, provide evidence not
only of a different way of seeing, but also of a way of speaking very
different from that to which so many of us are accustomed. The
practice of language among indigenous peoples would seem to carry
a very different significance than it does in the modern West. En-
acted primarily in song, prayer, and story, among oral peoples lan-
guage functions not simply to dialogue with other humans but also

Philosophy on the Way to Ecology 71

to converse with the more-than-human cosmos, to renew reciprocity
with the surrounding powers of earth and sky, to invoke kinship
even with those entities which, to the civilized mind, are utterly
insentient and inert. Hence, a Lakota medicine person may ad-
dress a stone as “Tunkashila”—“Grandfather.” Likewise, among the
Omaha, a rock may be addressed with the respect and reverence that
one pays to an ancient elder:

unmoved

from time without

end

you rest

there in the midst of the paths

in the midst of the winds

you rest

covered with the droppings of birds
grass growing from your feet

your head decked with the down of birds
you rest

in the midst of the winds

you wait

Aged one.”8

Here words do not speak about the world; rather they speak to the
world, and to the expressive presences that, with us, inhabit the
world. In multiple and diverse ways, taking (as we shall see) a unique
form in each indigenous culture, spoken language seems to give
voice to, and thus to enhance and accentuate, the sensorial affinity
between humans and the environing earth.

This would appear, at least at first, to be in direct contradiction to
the character of linguistic discourse in the “developed” or “civi-
lized” world, where language functions largely to deny reciprocity
with nature—by defining the rest of nature as inert, mechanical, and
determinate—and where, in consequence, our sensorial participa-
tion with the land around us must remain mute, inchoate, and in
mostcases wholly unconscious. In indigenous, oral cultures, in other
words, language seems to encourage and augment the participatory
life of the senses, while in Western civilization language seems to

72 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

deny or deaden that life, promoting a massive distrust of sensorial
experience while valorizing an abstract realm of ideas hidden behind
or beyond the sensory appearances.

How can we account for this divergence? In what manner can we
make sense of this difference in the character of language, and in the
relation between language and perception? Before attempting a pre-
cise answer to this question, we must come to a clearer understand-
ing of just what is meant, in this context, by “language.”

The Flesh of Language

The rain surrounded the cabin... with a whole world of meaning, of
secrecy, of rumor. Think of it: all that speech pouring down, selling
nothing, judging nobody, drenching the thick mulch of dead leaves,
soaking the trees, filling the gullies and crannies of the wood with
water, washing out the places where men have stripped the hill-
side. ... Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it. It will talk as long
as it wants, the rain. As long as it talks I am going to listen.

— THOMAS MERTON

VERY ATTEMPT TO DEFINITIVELY SAY WHAT LANGUAGE IS

is subject to a curious limitation. For the only medium with

which we can define language is language itself. We are
therefore unable to circumscribe the whole of language within our
definition. It may be best, then, to leave language undefined, and to
thus acknowledge its open-endedness, its mysteriousness. Neverthe-
less, by paying attention to this mystery we may develop a conscious
familiarity with it, a sense of its texture, its habits, its sources of sus-
tenance.

Merleau-Ponty, as we have seen, spent much of his life demon-
strating that the event of perception unfolds as a reciprocal exchange
between the living body and the animate world that surrounds it. He
showed, as well, that this exchange, for all its openness and indeter-

74 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

minacy, is nevertheless highly articulate. (Although it confounds the
causal logic that we attempt to impose upon it, perceptual experi-
ence has its own coherent structure; it seems to embody an open-
ended logos that we enact from within rather than the abstract logic
we deploy from without.) The disclosure that preverbal perception
is already an exchange, and the recognition that this exchange has its
own coherence and articulation, together suggested that perception,
this ongoing reciprocity, is the very soil and support of that more
conscious exchange we call language.

Already in the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty had
begun to work out a notion of human language as a profoundly car-
nal phenomenon, rooted in our sensorial experience of each other
and of the world. In a famous chapter entitled “The Body as Ex-
pression, and Speech,” he wrote at length of the gestural genesis of
language, the way that communicative meaning is first incarnate in
the gestures by which the body spontaneously expresses feelings and
responds to changes in its affective environment. The gesture is
spontaneous and immediate. It is not an arbitrary sign that we men-
tally attach to a particular emotion or feeling; rather, the gesture 7s
the bodying-forth of that emotion into the world, it zs that feeling
of delight or of anguish in its tangible, visible aspect. When we
encounter such a spontaneous gesture, we do not first see it as a
blank behavior, which we then mentally associate with a particular
content or significance; rather, the bodily gesture speaks directly to
our own body, and is thereby understood without any interior re-
flection:

Faced with an angry or threatening gesture, I have no need, in
order to understand it, to [mentally] recall the feelings which I
myself experienced when I used these gestures on my own ac-
count. ... I do not see anger or a threatening attitude as a psychic
fact hidden behind the gesture, I read anger in it. The gesture
does not make me think of anger, it is anger itself.!

Active, living speech is just such a gesture, a vocal gesticulation
wherein the meaning is inseparable from the sound, the shape, and
the rhythm of the words. Communicative meaning is always, in its
depths, affective; it remains rooted in the sensual dimension of ex-

The Flesh of Language 75

perience, born of the body’s native capacity to resonate with other
bodies and with the landscape as a whole. Linguistic meaning is not
some ideal and bodiless essence that we arbitrarily assign to a phys-
ical sound or word and then toss out into the “external” world.
Rather, meaning sprouts in the very depths of the sensory world, in
the heat of meeting, encounter, participation.

We do not, as children, first enter into language by consciously
studying the formalities of syntax and grammar or by memorizing
the dictionary definitions of words, but rather by actively making
sounds—by crying in pain and laughing in joy, by squealing and
babbling and playfully mimicking the surrounding soundscape,
gradually entering through such mimicry into the specific melodies
of the local language, our resonant bodies slowly coming to echo the
inflections and accents common to our locale and community.

We thus learn our native language not mentally but bodily. We ap-
propriate new words and phrases first through their expressive tonal-
ity and texture, through the way they feel in the mouth or roll off the
tongue, and it is this direct, felt significance—the taste of a word or
phrase, the way it influences or modulates the body—that provides
the fertile, polyvalent source for all the more refined and rarefied
meanings which that term may come to have for us.

... the meaning of words must be finally induced by the words
themselves, or more exactly, their conceptual meaning must be
formed by a kind of subtraction from a gestural meaning, which is
immanent in speech.”

Language, ‘then, cannot be genuinely studied or understood in
isolation from the sensuous reverberation and resonance of active
speech. James M. Edie attempts to summarize this aspect of Mer-
leau-Ponty’s thought in this manner:

... Merleau-Ponty’s first point is that words, even when they fi-
nally achieve the ability to carry referential and, eventually, con-
ceptual levels of meaning, never completely lose that primitive,
strictly phonemic, level of ‘affective’ meaning which is not trans-
latable into their conceptual definitions. There is, he argues, an
affective tonality, a mode of conveying meaning beneath the level

76 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

of thought, beneath the level of the words themselves . . . which
is contained in the words just insofar as they are patterned sounds,
as just the sounds which this particular historical language
uniquely uses, and which are much more like a melody—a
‘singing of the world’—than fully translatable, conceptual
thought. Merleau-Ponty is almost alone among philosophers of

language in his sensitivity to this level of meaning... .7

Edie here emphasizes Merleau-Ponty’s originality with regard to
language, and asserts that Merleau-Ponty gave special attention to
“what no philosopher from Plato on down ever had any interest in”
(namely, the gestural significance of spoken sounds). Yet this asser-
tion is true only if one holds a very restricted view of the philosoph-
ical tradition. The expressive, gestural basis of language had already
been emphasized in the first half of the eighteenth century by the
Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), who in his New
Science wrote of language as arising from expressive gestures, and
suggested that the earliest and most basic words had taken shape
from expletives uttered in startled response to powerful natural
events, or from the frightened, stuttering mimesis of such events—
like the crack and rumble of thunder across the sky.* Shortly there-
after, in France, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) wrote of
gestures and spontaneous expressions of feeling as the earliest
forms of language, while in Germany, Johann Gottfried Herder
(1744-1803) argued that language originates in our sensuous recep-
tivity to the sounds and shapes of the natural environment.°

In his embodied philosophy of language, then, Merleau-Ponty is
the heir of a long-standing, if somewhat heretical, lineage. Linguis-
tic meaning, for him, is rooted in the felt experience induced by spe-
cific sounds and sound-shapes as they echo and contrast with one
another, each language a kind of song, a particular way of “singing
the world.”

The Flesh of Language 77

Toward an Ecology of Language

The more prevalent view of language, at least since the scientific
revolution, and still assumed in some manner by most linguists
today, considers any language to be a set of arbitrary but conven-
tionally agreed upon words, or “signs,” linked by a purely formal
system of syntactic and grammatical rules. Language, in this view, is
rather like a code; it is a way of representing actual things and events
in the perceived world, but it has no internal, nonarbitrary connec-
tions to that world, and hence is readily separable from it.

If we agree with Merleau-Ponty’s assertion that active speech is
the generative core of all language, how can we possibly account for
the overwhelming prevalence of a view that considers language to be
an ideal or formal system readily detachable from the material act of
speaking? Merleau-Ponty suggests that such a view of language
could arise only at a time when the fresh creation of meaning has be-
come a rare occurrence, a time when people commonly speak in con-
ventional, ready-made ways “which demand from us no real effort of
expression and . .. demand from our listeners no real effort of com-
prehension”—at a time, in short, when meaning has become impov-
erished.°®

Yet there is another, more overt reason for the dominance of the
idea that language is an arbitrary, or strictly conventional, set of
signs. As we noted earlier, European philosophy has consistently oc-
cupied itself with the question of human specialness. Ever since
Aristotle, philosophers have been concerned to demonstrate, in the
most convincing manner possible, that human beings are signifi-
cantly different from all other forms of life. It was not enough to
demonstrate that human beings were unique, for each species is evi-
dently unique in its way; rather, it was necessary to show that the
human form was uniquely unique, that our noble gifts set us defini-
tively apart from, and above, the rest of the animate world. Such
demonstrations were, we may suspect, needed to justify the increas-
ing manipulation and exploitation of nonhuman nature by, and for,
(civilized) humankind. The necessity for such philosophical justifi-
cation became especially urgent in the wake of the scientific revolu-

78 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

tion, when our capacity to manipulate other organisms increased a
hundredfold. Descartes’s radical separation of the immaterial hu-
man mind from the wholly mechanical world of nature did much to
fill this need, providing a splendid rationalization for the vivisection
experiments that soon began to proliferate, as well as for the steady
plundering and despoilment of nonhuman nature in the New World
and the other European colonies.

But in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the publication of
Darwin’s Origin of Species and The Descent of Man introduced a
profound tension into the anthropocentric trajectory of European
philosophy and science. If humans are animals evolved like other
animals, if in truth we are descended by “natural selection” from
primates, if indeed fish are our distant ancestors and mice are our
cousins, then our own traits and capacities must be, to some degree,
continuous with those found in the rest of the earthly environment.

Most scientists, however, while accepting Darwin’s theories, were
reluctant to relinquish the assumption of human specialness—the
assumption that alone justifies so many of the cultural and research
practices to which we have now become accustomed. In earlier cen-
turies we could ascribe our superiority to the dispensation of God,
who had “created” us as his representatives on earth, or who had be-
queathed to humans alone the divine capacity for awareness and in-
telligence. After Darwin, however, we no longer had such easy
recourse to extraworldly dispensation; it became necessary to find
new, more naturalistic evidence for the superiority of humankind.

In our own time it is /anguage, conceived as an exclusively human
property, that is most often used to demonstrate the excellence of
humankind relative to all other species. Other animals have been
shown to build complex dwellings, even to use tools. But language, it
is widely asserted, remains the special provenance of the human
species. To be sure, most other animals manage to communicate
with each other, often employing a repertoire of gestures, from
“marking” territory with chemical secretions, to the facial expres-
sions of many mammal species, to the host of rattles, cries, howls,
and growls that sound across the fields and forests—to say nothing
of the complex melodic songs employed, most obviously by birds, as
well as by various marine-dwelling mammals like orcas and hump-
back whales. One of the founding events of the science of ethology,

The Flesh of Language 79

earlier in this century, was the discovery of the intricate “waggle-
dance” whereby individual bees communicate the precise direction
and distance of a newfound food source to the rest of the hive. Yet

”

each of these communicative arrays—these “dances,” “songs,” and
gestures, both vocal and visual—may be said to remain within the
sphere of felt, bodily expression. The meanings here, it is assumed,
are tied to the expressive nature of the gestures themselves, and to
the direct sensations induced by these movements—to the immedi-
acy of instinct and bodily urge.

In everyday human discourse, on the other hand, we readily lo-
cate a dimension of significance beyond the merely expressive power
of the words, a layer of abstract meanings fixed solely, it would seem,
by convention. Thus, the term “Wow!” may at first be a simple ex-
pression of wonder, but it may also come to designate, if we so
choose, a particular type of hairdo, or a shade of blue, or a specific
tactic to be used when debating with fishermen. It is this second
layer of agreed-upon meanings that is identified with “language in
the proper sense” by most philosophers and scientists since the En-
lightenment. Only by isolating this secondary layer of conventional
meanings from the felt significance carried by the tone, rhythm, and
resonance of spoken expressions can we conceive of language as a
code—as a determinate and mappable structure composed of arbi-
trary signs linked by purely formal rules. And only thus, by conceiv-
ing language as a purely abstract phenomenon, can we claim it as an
exclusively human attribute. Only by overlooking the sensuous,
evocative dimension of human discourse, and attending solely to
the denotative and conventional aspect of verbal communication,
can we hold ourselves apart from, and outside of, the rest of animate
nature.

If Merleau-Ponty is right, however, then the denotative, conven-
tional dimension of language can never be truly severed from the
sensorial dimension of direct, affective meaning. If we are not, in
truth, immaterial minds merely housed in earthly bodies, but are
from the first material, corporeal beings, then it is the sensuous, ges-
tural significance of spoken sounds—their direct bodily resonance—
that makes verbal communication possible at all. It is this expressive
potency—the soundful influence of spoken words upon the sensing
body—that supports all the more abstract and conventional mean-

80 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

ings that we assign to those words.’ Although we may be oblivious to
the gestural, somatic dimension of language, having repressed it in
favor of strict dictionary definitions and the abstract precision of spe-
cialized terminologies, this dimension remains subtly operative in all
our speaking and writing—if, that is, our words have any significance
whatsoever. For meaning, as we have said, remains rooted in the sen-
sory life of the body—it cannot be completely cut off from the soil
of direct, perceptual experience without withering and dying.®

Yet to affirm that linguistic meaning is primarily expressive, ges-
tural, and poetic, and that conventional and denotative meanings are
inherently secondary and derivative, is to renounce the claim that
“language” is an exclusively human property. If language is always,
in its depths, physically and sensorially resonant, then it can never
be definitively separated from the evident expressiveness of bird-
song, or the evocative howl of a wolf late at night. The chorus of
frogs gurgling in unison at the edge of a pond, the snarl of a wildcat
as it springs upon its prey, or the distant honking of Canadian geese
veeing south for the winter, all reverberate with affective, gestural
significance, the same significance that vibrates through our own
conversations and soliloquies, moving us at times to tears, or to
anger, or to intellectual insights we could never have anticipated.
Language as a bodily phenomenon accrues to all expressive bodies,
not just to the human. Our own speaking, then, does not set us out-
side of the animate landscape but—whether or not we are aware of
it—inscribes us more fully in its chattering, whispering, soundful
depths.

If, for instance, one comes upon two human friends unexpectedly
meeting for the first time in many months, and one chances to hear
their initial words of surprise, greeting, and pleasure, one may read-
ily notice, if one pays close enough attention, a tonal, melodic layer
of communication beneath the explicit denotative meaning of the
words—a rippling rise and fall of the voices in a sort of musical duet,
rather like two birds singing to each other. Each voice, each side of
the duet, mimes a bit of the other’s melody while adding its own in-
flection and style, and then is echoed by the other in turn—the two
singing bodies thus tuning and attuning to one another, rediscover-
ing a common register, remembering each other. It requires only a
slight shift in focus to realize that this melodic singing is carrying the

The Flesh of Language 81

bulk of communication in this encounter, and that the explicit
meanings of the actual words ride on the surface of this depth like
waves on the surface of the sea.

It is by acomplementary shift of attention that one may suddenly
come to hear the familiar song of a blackbird or a thrush in a sur-
prisingly new manner—not just as a pleasant melody repeated me-
chanically, as on a tape player in the background, but as active,
meaningful speech. Suddenly, subtle variations in the tone and
rhythm of that whistling phrase seem laden with expressive inten-
tion, and the two birds singing to each other across the field appear
for the first time as attentive, conscious beings, earnestly engaged in
the same world that we ourselves engage, yet from an astonishingly
different angle and perspective.

Moreover, if we allow that spoken meaning remains rooted in
gesture and bodily expressiveness, we will be unable to restrict our
renewed experience of language solely to animals. As we have al-
ready recognized, in the untamed world of direct sensory experience
no phenomenon presents itself as utterly passive or inert. To the
sensing body all phenomena are animate, actively soliciting the par-
ticipation of our senses, or else withdrawing from our focus and
repelling our involvement. Things disclose themselves to our imme-
diate perception as vectors, as styles of unfolding—not as finished
chunks of matter given once and for all, but as dynamic ways of en-
gaging the senses and modulating the body. Each thing, each phe-
nomenon, has the power to reach us and to influence us. Every
phenomenon, in other words, is potentially expressive. At the end of
his chapter “The Body as Expression, and Speech,” Merleau-Ponty
writes:

It is the body which points out, and which speaks... . This dis-
closure [of the body’s immanent expressiveness] . . . extends, as
we shall see, to the whole sensible world, and our gaze, prompted
by the experience of our own body, will discover in all other “ob-
jects” the miracle of expression.’

Thus, at the most primordial level of sensuous, bodily experience,
we find ourselves in an expressive, gesturing landscape, in a world
that speaks.

82 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

We regularly talk of howling winds, and of chattering brooks. Yet
these are more than mere metaphors. Our own languages are contin-
ually nourished by these other voices—by the roar of waterfalls and
the thrumming of crickets. It is not by chance that, when hiking in
the mountains, the English terms we spontaneously use to describe
the surging waters of the nearby river are words like “rush,”
“splash,” “gush,” “wash.” For the sound that unites all these words
is that which the water itself chants as it flows between the banks. If
language is not a purely mental phenomenon but a sensuous, bodily
activity born of carnal reciprocity and participation, then our dis-
course has surely been influenced by many gestures, sounds, and
rhythms besides those of our single species. Indeed, if human lan-
guage arises from the perceptual interplay between the body and the
world, then this language “belongs” to the animate landscape as
much as it “belongs” to ourselves.

IN 1945, MERLEAU-PONTY BEGAN READING THE WORK OF THE SWISS
linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), whose posthumously
published Course in General Lingutstics signaled the emergence of
scientific linguistics in the twentieth century.'* Merleau-Ponty was
intrigued by Saussure’s theoretical distinction between la langue—
language considered as a system of terminological, syntactic, and se-
mantic rules, and la parole—the concrete act of speech itself.

Language considered as a formal system of rules and conventions
is that aspect of language which, alone, is susceptible to objective,
scientific study. By isolating this aspect of language, Saussure effec-
tively cleared the way for the rigorous, scientific analysis of language
systems. Yet the proper way to understand the relation between the
formal structure of language and the expressive act of speaking (be-
tween /a langue and la parole) remained enigmatic, and it was this
enigma that most fascinated Merleau-Ponty.

For Saussure, la langue—language considered as a purely struc-
tural system—was not a mechanical structure that could readily be
taken apart into its separable components, but more an organic, liv-
ing system, each of whose parts is internally related to all the others.
Saussure described the structure of any language as a thoroughly in-
terdependent matrix, a webwork wherein each term has meaning

The Flesh of Language 83

only by virtue of its relation to other terms within the system. In
English, for instance, the sounded word “red” draws its precise
meaning from its situation in a network of like-sounding terms, in-
cluding, for instance, “read,” “rod,” “reed,” and “raid,” and in a

6 6

whole complex of color terms, such as “orange,” “yellow,” “purple,”
“brown”; as well as from its participation ina still wider nexus of re-
lated terms like “blood,” “rose,” “sunset,” “fire,” “blush,” “angry,”
“hot,” each of which holds significance only in relation to a constel-
lation of still other words, expanding thus outward to every term
within the language. By describing any particular language as a sys-
tem of differences, Saussure indicated that meaning is found not in
the words themselves but in the intervals, the contrasts, the partici-
pations between the terms. As Merleau-Ponty states:

What we have learned from Saussure is that, taken singly, signs
do not signify anything, and that each one of them does not so
much express a meaning as mark a divergence of meaning be-

tween itself and other signs.!!

This does not mean that it is necessary to know, explicitly, the
whole of a language in order to speak it. Rather, the weblike nature
of language ensures that the whole of the system is implicitly pre-
sent in every sentence, in every phrase. In order to learn a commu-
nity’s language, suggests Merleau-Ponty, it is necessary simply to
begin speaking, to enter the language with one’s body, to begin to
move within it. The language in its entirety is invoked by the child
in his first attempts at speech. “[Then] the whole of the spoken lan-
guage surrounding the child snaps him up like a whirlwind, tempts
him by its internal articulations. .. .”!?

The enigma that is language, constituted as much by silence as by
sounds, is not an inert or static structure, but an evolving bodily
field. It is like a vast, living fabric continually being woven by those
who speak. Merleau-Ponty here distinguishes sharply between gen-
uine, expressive speech and speech that merely repeats established
formulas. The latter is hardly “speech” at all; it does not really carry
meaning in the weave of its words but relies solely upon the memory
of meanings that once lived there. It does not alter the already exist-
ing structures of the language, but rather treats the language as a fin-

84 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

ished institution. Nevertheless, those preexisting structures must at
some moment have been created, and this can only have been ef-
fected by active, expressive speech. Indeed, all truly meaningful
speech is inherently creative, using established words in ways they
have never quite been used before, and thus altering, ever so slightly,
the whole webwork of the language. Wild, living speech takes up,
from within, the interconnected matrix of the language and gestures
with it, subjecting the whole structure to a “coherent deformation.”

At the heart of any language, then, is the poetic productivity of
expressive speech. A living language is continually being made and
remade, woven out of the silence by those who speak. .. . And this
silence is that of our wordless participations, of our perceptual im-
mersion in the depths of an animate, expressive world.

Thus, Saussure’s distinction between the structure of language
and the activity of speech is ultimately undermined by Merleau-
Ponty, the two dimensions blended back together into a single, ever-
evolving matrix. While individual speech acts are surely guided by
the structured lattice of the language, that lattice is nothing other
than the sedimented result of all previous acts of speech, and will it-
self be altered by the very expressive activity it now guides. Lan-
guage is not a fixed or ideal form, but an evolving medium we
collectively inhabit, a vast topological matrix in which the speaking
bodies are generative sites, vortices where the matrix itself is contin-
ually being spun out of the silence of sensorial experience.

What Merleau-Ponty retains from Saussure is Saussure’s notion
of any language as an interdependent, weblike system of relations.
But since our expressive, speaking bodies are for Merleau-Ponty
necessary parts of this system—since the web of language is for him
a carnal medium woven in the depths of our perceptual participation
with the things and beings around us—Merleau-Ponty comes in his
final writings to affirm that it is first the sensuous, perceptual world
that is relational and weblike in character, and hence that the or-
ganic, interconnected structure of any language is an extension or
echo of the deeply interconnected matrix of sensorial reality itself.'
Ultimately, it is not human language that is primary, but rather the
sensuous, perceptual life-world, whose wild, participatory logic
ramifies and elaborates itself in language.

Since the mid-nineteenth century, the study of our earthly envi-

The Flesh of Language 85

ronment has increasingly yielded a view of nature as a realm of com-
plexly interwoven relationships, a field of subtle interdependencies
from which, in John Muir’s words, no single phenomenon can be
picked out without “finding it hitched to everything else.” The char-
acter of an individual fruit tree simply cannot be understood with-
out reference to the others of its species, to the insects that fertilize
it and to the animals that consume its fruit and so disperse its seeds.
Yet a single one of those animals can hardly be comprehended with-
out learning of the other plants or animals that it eats throughout the
year, and of the predators that prey upon it—without, in other
words, acknowledging the host of other organisms upon which that
animal depends, and which depend upon it. We have at last come to
realize that neither the soils, the oceans, nor the atmosphere can be
comprehended without taking into account the participation of in-
numerable organisms, from the lichens that crumble rocks, and the
bacterial entities that decompose organic detritus, to all the respiring
plants and animals exchanging vital gases with the air. The notion
of earthly nature as a densely interconnected organic network—
a “biospheric web” wherein each entity draws its specific character
from its relations, direct and indirect, to all the others—has today
become commonplace, and it converges neatly with Merleau-
Ponty’s late description of sensuous reality, “the Flesh,” as an inter-
twined, and actively intertwining, lattice of mutually dependent
phenomena, both sensorial and sentient, of which our own sensing
bodies are a part.

It is this dynamic, interconnected reality that provokes and sus-
tains all our speaking, lending something of its structure to all our
various languages. The enigmatic nature of language echoes and
“prolongs unto the invisible” the wild, interpenetrating, interdepen-
dent nature of the sensible landscape itself.

Ultimately, then, it is not the human body alone but rather the
whole of the sensuous world that provides the deep structure of lan-
guage. As we ourselves dwell and move within language, so, ulti-
mately, do the other animals and animate things of the world; if we
do not notice them there, it is only because language has forgotten its
expressive depths. “Language is a life, is our life and the life of the
things... .”!* It is no more true that we speak than that the things,
and the animate world itself, speak within us:

86 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

That the things have us and that it is not we who have the
things. ... That it is being that speaks within us and not we who
_ speak of being."*

From such reflections we may begin to suspect that the complexity
of human language is related to the complexity of the earthly ecol-
ogy—not to any complexity of our species considered apart from
that matrix. Language, writes Merleau-Ponty, “is the very voice of
the trees, the waves, and the forests.” !®

As technological civilization diminishes the biotic diversity of the
earth, language itself is diminished. As there are fewer and fewer
songbirds in the air, due to the destruction of their forests and
wetlands, human speech loses more and more of its evocative power.
For when we no longer hear the voices of warbler and wren, our
own speaking can no longer be nourished by their cadences. As
the splashing speech of the rivers is silenced by more and more
dams, as we drive more and more of the land’s wild voices into the
oblivion of extinction, our own languages become increasingly im-
poverished and weightless, progressively emptied of their earthly

resonance.!”

word Magic

Merleau-Ponty’s work on language is admittedly fragmentary and
unfinished, cut short by his sudden death. Yet it provides the most
extensive investigation we have, as yet, into the living experience of
language—the way the expressive medium discloses itself to us
when we do not pretend to stand outside it, but rather accept our in-
herence within it, as speaking animals. When we attend to our expe-
rience not as intangible minds but as sounding, speaking bodies, we
begin to sense that we are heard, even listened to, by the numerous
other bodies that surround us. Our sensing bodies respond to the
eloquence of certain buildings and boulders, to the articulate mo-
tions of dragonflies. We find ourselves alive in a listening, speaking
world.

The Flesh of Language 87

Here (as we saw earlier with regard to perception) Merleau-
Ponty’s work resonates, and brings us close to, the spoken beliefs of
many indigenous, oral peoples.

In such indigenous cultures the solidarity between language and
the animate landscape is palpable and evident. According to Ogo-
temméli, an elder of the Dogon tribe of Mali, spoken language was
originally a swirling garment of vapour and breath worn by the en-
compassing earth itself. Later this undulating garment was stolen by
the jackal, an animal whose movements, ever since, have disclosed
the prophetic speech of the world to seers and diviners.'® Many
tribes, like the Swampy Cree of Manitoba, hold that they were given
spoken language by the animals.'? For the Inuit (Eskimo), as for nu-
merous other peoples, humans and animals all originally spoke the
same language. According to Nalungiaq, an Inuit woman inter-
viewed by ethnologist Knud Rasmussen early in the twentieth cen-
tury:

In the very earliest time

when both people and animals lived on earth,

a person could become an animal if he wanted to
and an animal could become a human being.
Sometimes they were people

and sometimes animals

and there was no difference.

All spoke the same language.

That was the time when words were like magic.
The human mind had mysterious powers.

A word spoken by chance

might have strange consequences.

It would suddenly come alive

and what people wanted to happen could happen—
all you had to do was say it.

Nobody could explain this:

That’s the way it was.”

Despite this originary language common to both people and ani-
mals, the various animals and other natural forms today speak their
own unique dialects. But nevertheless all speak, all have the power of

88 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

language. Moreover, traces of the primordial common language re-
main, and just as a human may suddenly understand the subtle ges-
tures of a deer, or the guttural speech of a raven, so the other entities
hear, and may understand, our own talking.

Owls often make it difficult to speak Cree with them. They can
cause stuttering, and when stuttering is going on they are at-
tracted to it. It is said that stuttering is laughable to owls. Yet this
can work to the Cree’s advantage as well, for if you think an owl
is causing trouble in your village, then go stutter in the woods.
There’s a good chance an owl will arrive. Then you can confront
this owl, question it, argue with it, perhaps solve the problem.?!

Most indigenous hunting peoples carefully avoid speaking about
the hunt beforehand, or referring directly to the species that they
are hunting, lest they offend the listening animals themselves. After
the kill, however, they will speak directly to the dying animal, prais-
ing it, promising respect, and thanking it for offering itself to
them.”?

Yet it is those who are recognized as shamans, or medicine per-
sons, who most fully remember the primordial sacred language, and
who are thus able to slip, at will, out of the purely human discourse
in order to converse directly with the other powers. As Mircea
Eliade writes:

The existence of a specific secret language has been verified
among the Lapps, the Ostyak, the Chukchee, the Yakut, and the
Tungus. During his trance the Tungus shaman is believed to un-
derstand the language of all nature... ..

Very often this secret language is actually the “animal lan-
guage” or originates in animal cries. In South America the neo-
phyte must learn, during his initiation period, to imitate the
voices of animals. The same is true of North America. The Pomo
and the Menomini shamans, among others, imitate bird songs.
During séances among the Yakut, the Yukagir, the Chukchee, the
Goldi, the Eskimo, and others, wild animal cries and bird calls are
heard....

Many words used during the séance have their origin in the
cries of birds or other animals. .. . “Magic” and “song”—espe-

The Flesh of Language 89

cially song like that of birds—are frequently expressed by the
same term. The Germanic word for magic formula is galdy, de-
rived from the verb galan, “to sing,” a term applied especially to
bird calls.?3

We will later explore at length specific instances of this affinity
between language and the animate landscape as it is embodied not
only in myths and magical practices but in the everyday discourse of
several contemporary indigenous tribes. Here it is enough to men-
tion that Merleau-Ponty’s view of language as a thoroughly incar-
nate medium, of speech as rhythm and expressive gesture, and
hence of spoken words and phrases as active sensuous presences
afoot in the material landscape (rather than as ideal forms that
represent, but are not a part of, the sensuous world)—goes a long
way toward helping us understand the primacy of language and
word magic in native rituals of transformation, metamorphosis, and
healing. Only if words are felt, bodily presences, like echoes or water-
falls, can we understand the power of spoken language to influence, alter,
and transform the perceptual world. As this is expressed in a Modoc
song:

I
the song
I walk here?*

To neglect this dimension—to overlook the power that words or
spoken phrases have to influence the body, and hence to modulate
our sensory experience of the world around us—is to render even
the most mundane, communicative capacity of language incompre-
hensible.

WE MAY VERY BRIEFLY SUMMARIZE THE GENERAL RESULTS OF
Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological investigations, or at least our
own interpretation of those results, as follows: (1) The event of per-
ception, experientially considered, is an inherently interactive, par-
ticipatory event, a reciprocal interplay between the perceiver and the
perceived. (2) Perceived things are encountered by the perceiving

90 ‘THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

body as animate, living powers that actively draw us into relation.
Our spontaneous, pre-conceptual experience yields no evidence for
a dualistic division between animate and “inanimate” phenomena,
only for relative distinctions between diverse forms of animateness.
(3) The perceptual reciprocity between our sensing bodies and the
animate, expressive landscape both engenders and supports our
more conscious, linguistic reciprocity with others. The complex in-
terchange that we call “language” is rooted in the non-verbal ex-
change always already going on between our own flesh and the flesh
of the world. (4) Human languages, then, are informed not only by
the structures of the human body and the human community, but by
the evocative shapes and patterns of the more-than-human terrain.
Experientially considered, language is no more the special property
of the human organism than it is an expression of the animate earth
that enfolds us.

Such, at any rate, are the sort of descriptions at which we arrive
when we carefully attend to perception and to language as we di-
rectly experience them.

Here, however, this philosophy encounters an impasse that
threatens to dissipate its conclusions and to invalidate all its efforts.
Specifically, if sensory perception is inherently participatory, and if,
as Merleau-Ponty has maintained, perception (broadly considered)
is the inescapable source of all experience, how can we possibly ac-
count for the apparent absence of participation in the modern
world? “What right have I,” asks Merleau-Ponty, “to call ‘immedi-
ate’ this original that can be forgotten to such an extent?”* If our
primordial experience is inherently animistic, if our “immediate”
awareness discloses a field of phenomena that are all potentially ani-
mate and expressive, how can we ever account for the Joss of such an-
imateness from the world around us? How can we account for our
culture’s experience of other animals as senseless automata, or of
trees as purely passive fodder for lumber mills? If perception, in its
depths, is wholly participatory, how could we ever have broken out
of those depths into the inert and determinate world we now com-
monly perceive?

We may suspect, at first, that the apparent loss of participation
has something to do with language. For language, although it is
rooted in perception, nevertheless has a profound capacity to turn

The Flesh of Language 91

back upon, and influence, our sensorial experience. While the reci-
procity of perception engenders the more explicit reciprocity of
speech and language, perception always remains vulnerable to the
decisive influence of language, as a mother remains especially sensi-
tive to the actions of her child. It was this influence that led the
American linguist Edward Sapir to formulate his hypothesis of lin-
guistic determination, suggesting that one’s perception is largely de-
termined by the language that one speaks:

We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do
because the language habits of our community predispose certain
choices of interpretation.”®

Certainly, the perceptual style of any community is both reflected
in, and profoundly shaped by, the common language of the commu-
nity. Yet the influence of language alone can hardly explain the shift
from a participatory to a nonparticipatory world. Indeed, if we ac-
cept the phenomenological position sketched at length in this chap-
ter, then the turn toward language for a solution can only confront us
with a problem analogous to that which meets us with regard to per-
ception. If human discourse is experienced by indigenous, oral peo-
ples to be participant with the speech of birds, of wolves, and even
of the wind, how could it ever have become severed from that vaster
life? How could we ever have become so deaf to these other voices
that nonhuman nature now seems to stand mute and dumb, devoid
of any meaning besides that which we choose to give it?

If perception, in its depths, is truly participatory, why do we not
experience the rest of the world as animate and alive? If our own
language is truly dependent upon the existence of other, nonhuman
voices, why do we now experience language as an exclusively human
property or possession? These two questions are in fact the same
query asked from two different angles. Moreover, this query is the
very same that arose at the end of the first chapter, the same that I
there posed with regard to the felt shift in my own experience of
nonhuman nature upon returning to the West from my sojourn in
rural Asia. The question, however, is now set in a more methodic
context; it is backed up by a whole tradition of philosophical in-
quiry. It should now be evident, as well, that the question has more

92 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

than a purely personal relevance. Nonhuman nature seems to have
withdrawn from both our speaking and our senses. What event
could have precipitated this double withdrawal, constricting our
ways of speaking even as it muffled our ears and set a veil before
our eyes?

Animism and the Alphabet

Lifting a brush, a burin, a pen, or a stylus
is like releasing a bite or lifting a claw.

—GARY SNYDER

HE QUESTION REGARDING THE ORIGINS OF THE ECOLOGI-

cal crisis, or of modern civilization’s evident disregard for

the needs of the natural world, has already provoked vari-
ous responses from philosophers. There are those who suggest that
a generally exploitative relation to the rest of nature is part and par-
cel of being human, and hence that the human species has from the
start been at war with other organisms and the earth. Others, how-
ever, have come to recognize that long-established indigenous cul-
tures often display a remarkable solidarity with the lands that they
inhabit, as well as a basic respect, or even reverence, for the other
species that inhabit those lands. Such cultures, much smaller in scale
(and far less centralized) than modern Western civilization, seem to
have maintained a relatively homeostatic or equilibrial relation with

94 ‘THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

their local ecologies for vast periods of time, deriving their necessary
sustenance from the land without seriously disrupting the ability of
the earth to replenish itself. The fecundity and flourishing diversity
of the North American continent led the earliest European explor-
ers to speak of this terrain as a primeval and unsettled wilderness—
yet this continent had been continuously inhabited by human
cultures for at least ten thousand years. That indigenous peoples can
have gathered, hunted, fished, and settled these lands for such a
tremendous span of time without severely degrading the continent’s
wild integrity readily confounds the notion that humans are innately
bound to ravage their earthly surroundings. In a few centuries of
European settlement, however, much of the native abundance of
this continent has been lost—its broad animal populations deci-
mated, its many-voiced forests overcut and its prairies overgrazed,
its rich soils depleted, its tumbling clear waters now undrinkable.

European civilization’s neglect of the natural world and its needs
has clearly been encouraged by a style of awareness that disparages
sensorial reality, denigrating the visible and tangible order of things on
behalf of some absolute source assumed to exist entirely beyond, or
outside of, the bodily world. Some historians and philosophers have
concluded that the Jewish and Christian traditions, with their other-
worldly God, are primarily responsible for civilization’s negligent
attitude toward the environing earth. They cite, as evidence, the He-
braic God’s injunction to humankind in Genesis: “Be fertile and in-
crease, fill the earth and master it; and rule the fish of the sea, the
birds of the sky, and all the living things that creep on earth.”!

Other thinkers, however, have turned toward the Greek origins of
our philosophical tradition, in the Athens of Socrates and Plato, in
their quest for the roots of our nature-disdain. A long line of recent
philosophers, stretching from Friedrich Nietzsche down to the pres-
ent, have attempted to demonstrate that Plato’s philosophical dero-
gation of the sensible and changing forms of the world—his claim
that these are mere simulacra of eternal and pure ideas existing in
a nonsensorial realm beyond the apparent world—contributed
profoundly to civilization’s distrust of bodily and sensorial experi-
ence, and to our consequent estrangement from the earthly world
around us.

So the ancient Hebrews, on the one hand, and the ancient Greeks

Animism and the Alphabet 95

on the other, are variously taken to task for providing the mental
context that would foster civilization’s mistreatment of nonhuman
nature. Egch of these two ancient cultures seems to have sown the
seeds of our contemporary estrangement—one seeming to establish
the spiritual or religious ascendancy of humankind over nature, the
other effecting a more philosophical or rational dissociation of the
human intellect from the organic world. Long before the historical
amalgamation of Hebraic religion and Hellenistic philosophy in the
Christian New Testament, these two bodies of belief already
shared—or seem to have shared—a similar intellectual distance from
the nonhuman environment.

In every other respect these two traditions, each one originating
out of its own specific antecedents, and in its own terrain and time,
were vastly different. In every other respect, that is, but one: they
were both, from the start, profoundly informed by writing. Indeed,
they both made use of the strange and potent technology which we
have come to call “the alphabet.”

WRITING, LIKE HUMAN LANGUAGE, IS ENGENDERED NOT ONLY
within the human community but between the human community
and the animate landscape, born of the interplay and contact be-
tween the human and the more-than-human world. The earthly ter-
rain in which we find ourselves, and upon which we depend for all
our nourishment, is shot through with suggestive scrawls and traces,
from the sinuous calligraphy of rivers winding across the land, in-
scribing arroyos and canyons into the parched earth of the desert, to
the black slash burned by lightning into the trunk of an old elm. The
swooping flight of birds is a kind of cursive script written on the
wind; it is this script that was studied by the ancient “augurs,” who
could read therein the course of the future. Leaf-miner insects make
strange hieroglyphic tabloids of the leaves they consume. Wolves
urinate on specific stumps and stones to mark off their territory.
And today you read these printed words as tribal hunters once read
the tracks of deer, moose, and bear printed in the soil of the forest
floor. Archaeological evidence suggests that for more than a million
years the subsistence of humankind has depended upon the acuity
of such hunters, upon their ability to read the traces—a bit of scat

96 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

here, a broken twig there—of these animal Others. These letters I
print across the page, the scratches and scrawls you now focus upon,
trailing off across the white surface, are hardly different from the
footprints of prey left in the snow. We read these traces with organs
honed over millennia by our tribal ancestors, moving instinctively
from one track to the next, picking up the trail afresh whenever it
leaves off, hunting the meaning, which would be the meeting with the
Other.”

The multiform meanings of the Chinese word for writing, wen,
illustrate well this interpenetration of human and nonhuman scripts:

The word wen signifies a conglomeration of marks, the simple
symbol in writing. It applies to the veins in stones and wood, to
constellations, represented by the strokes connecting the stars, to
the tracks of birds and quadrapeds on the ground (Chinese tradi-
tion would have it that the observation of these tracks suggested
the invention of writing), to tattoos and even, for example, to the
designs that decorate the turtle’s shell (“The turtle is wise,” an
ancient text says—gifted with magico-religious powers—“for it
carries designs on its back”). The term wen has designated, by ex-

tension, literature... .?

Our first writing, clearly, was our own tracks, our footprints, our
handprints in mud or ash pressed upon the rock. Later, perhaps, we
found that by copying the distinctive prints and scratches made by
other animals we could gain a new power; here was a method of
identifying with the other animal, taking on its expressive magic in
order to learn of its whereabouts, to draw it near, to make it appear.
Tracing the impression left by a deer’s body in the snow, or trans-
ferring that outline onto the wall of the cave: these are ways of plac-
ing oneself in distant contact with the Other, whether to invoke its
influence or to exert one’s own. Perhaps by multiplying its images on
the cavern wall we sought to ensure that the deer itself would multi-
ply, be bountiful in the coming season. . . .

All of the early writing systems of our species remain tied to the
mysteries of a more-than-human world. The petroglyphs of pre-
Columbian North America abound with images of prey animals, of
rain clouds and lightning, of eagle and snake, of the paw prints of

Animism and the Alphabet 97

bear. On rocks, canyon walls, and caves these figures mingle with
human shapes, or shapes part human and part Other (part insect, or
owl, or elk.)

Some researchers assert that the picture writing of native North
America is not yet “true” writing, even where the pictures are strung
together sequentially—as they are, obviously, in many of the rock
inscriptions (as well as in the calendrical “winter counts” of the
Plains tribes). For there seems, as yet, no strict relation between
image and utterance.

In a much more conventionalized pictographic system, like the
Egyptian hieroglyphics (which first appeared during the First Dy- -
nasty, around 3000 B.c.E. and remained in use until the second cen-
tury C.E.),* stylized images of humans and human implements are
still interspersed with those of plants, of various kinds of birds, as
well as of serpents, felines, and other animals. Such pictographic
systems, which were to be found as well in China as early as the fif-
teenth century B.C.E., and in Mesoamerica by the middle of the sixth
century B.C.E., typicaliy include characters that scholars have come
to call “ideograms.” An ideogram is often a pictorial character that
refers not to the visible entity that it explicitly pictures but to some
quality or other phenomenon readily associated with that entity.
Thus—to invent a simple example—a stylized image of a jaguar
with its feet off the ground might come to signify “speed.” For the
Chinese, even today, a stylized image of the sun and moon together
signifies “brightness”; similarly, the word for “east” is invoked by a
stylized image of the sun rising behind a tree.*

The efficacy of these pictorially derived systems necessarily en-
tails a shift of sensory participation away from the voices and ges-
tures of the surrounding landscape toward our own human-made
images. However, the glyphs which constitute the bulk of these an-
cient scripts continually remind the reading body of its inherence in
a more-than-human field of meanings. As signatures not only of the
human form but of other animals, trees, sun, moon, and landforms,
they continually refer our senses beyond the strictly human sphere.®

Yet even a host of pictograms and related ideograms will not suf-
fice for certain terms that exist in the local discourse. Such terms
may refer to phenomena that lack any precise visual association.
Consider, for example, the English word “belief.” How might we

98 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

signify this term in a pictographic, or ideographic, manner? An
image of a phantasmagorical monster, perhaps, or one of a person in
prayer. Yet no such ideogram would communicate the term as read-
ily and precisely as the simple image of a bumblebee, followed by the
figure of a leaf. We could, that is, resort to a visual pun, to images of
things that have nothing overtly to do with belief but which, when
named in sequence, carry the same sound as the spoken term “belief”
(“bee-leaf”). And indeed, such pictographic puns, or rebuses, came to
be employed early on by scribes in ancient China and in Mesoamer-
ica as well as in the Middle East, to record certain terms that were
especially amorphous or resistant to visual representation. Thus, for
instance, the Sumerian word tz, which means “life,” was written in
cuneiform with the pictorial sign for “arrow,” which in Sumerian is
also called ti.’

An important step has been taken here. With the rebus, a pictor-
ial sign is used to directly invoke a particular sound of the human
voice, rather than the outward reference of that sound. The rebus,
with its focus upon the sound of a name rather than the thing
named, inaugurated the distant possibility of a phonetic script (from
the Greek phonein: “to sound”), one that would directly transcribe
the sound of the speaking voice rather than its outward intent or
meaning.®

However, many factors impeded the generalization of the rebus
principle, and thus prevented the development of a fully phonetic
writing system. For example, a largely pictographic script can easily
be utilized, for communicative purposes, by persons who speak
very different dialects (and hence cannot understand one another’s
speech). The same image or ideogram, readily understood, would
simply invoke a different sound in each dialect. Thus a pictographic
script allows for commerce between neighboring and even distant
linguistic communities—an advance that would be lost if rebuslike
signs alone were employed to transcribe the spoken sounds of one
community. (This factor helps explain why China, a vast society
comprised of a multitude of distinct dialects, has never developed a
fully phonetic script.)?

Another factor inhibiting the development of a fully phonetic
script was the often elite status of the scribes. Ideographic scripts
must make use of a vast number of stylized glyphs or characters,

Animism and the Alphabet 99

since every term in the language must, at least in principle, have its
own written character. (In 1716 a dictionary of Chinese—admit-
tedly an extreme example—listed 40,545 written characters! Today
a mere 8,000 characters are in use.)'° Complete knowledge of the
pictographic system, therefore, could only be the province of a few
highly trained individuals. Literacy, within such cultures, was in fact
the literacy of a caste, or cult, whose sacred knowledge was often
held in great esteem by the rest of society. It is unlikely that the
scribes would willingly develop innovations that could simplify the
new technology and so render literacy more accessible to the rest of
the society, for this would surely lessen their own importance and
status.

... it is clear that ancient writing was in the hands of a small lit-
erate elite, the scribes, who manifested great conservatism in the
practice of their craft, and, so far from being interested in its sim-
plification, often chose to demonstrate their virtuosity by a pro-
liferation of signs and values. .. ."!

Nevertheless, in the ancient Middle East the rebus principle was
eventually generalized—probably by scribes working at a distance
from the affluent and established centers of civilization—to cover all
the common sounds of a given language. Thus, “syllabaries” ap-
peared, wherein every basic sound-syllable of the language had its
own conventional notation or written character (often rebuslike in
origin). Such writing systems employed far fewer signs than the pic-
tographic scripts from which they were derived, although the num-
ber of signs was still very much larger than the alphabetic script we
now take for granted.

The innovation which gave rise to the alphabet was itself devel-
oped by Semitic scribes around 1500 B.c.E.!? It consisted in recog-
nizing that almost every syllable of their language was composed of
one or more silent consonantal elements plus an element of sounded
breath—that which we would today call a vowel. The silent con-
sonants provided, as it were, the bodily framework or shape through
which the sounded breath must flow. The original Semitic aleph-
beth, then, established a character, or letter, for each of the conso-
nants of the language. The vowels, the sounded breath that must be

100 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

added to the written consonants in order to make them come alive
and to speak, had to be chosen by the reader, who would vary the
sounded breath according to the written context.

By this innovation, the aleph-beth was able to greatly reduce the
necessary number of characters for a written script to just twenty-
two—a simple set of signs that could be readily practiced and
learned ina brief period by anyone who had the chance, even by a
young child. The utter simplicity of this technical innovation was
such that the early Semitic aleph-beth, in which were written down
the various stories and histories that were later gathered into the He-
brew Bible, was adopted not only by the Hebrews but by the Phone-
cians (who presumably carried the new technology across the
Mediterranean to Greece), the Aramaeans, the Greeks, the Romans,
and indeed eventually gave rise (directly or indirectly) to virtually
every alphabet known, including that which I am currently using to
scribe these words.

With the advent of the aleph-beth, a new distance opens between
human culture and the rest of nature. To be sure, pictographic and
ideographic writing already involved a displacement of our sensory
participation from the depths of the animate environment to the flat
surface of our walls, of clay tablets, of the sheet of papyrus. How-
ever, as we noted above, the written images themselves often related
us back to the other animals and the environing earth. The picto-
graphic glyph or character still referred, implicitly, to the animate
phenomenon of which it was the static image; it was that worldly
phenomenon, in turn, that provoked from us the sound of its name.
The sensible phenomenon and its spoken name were, in a sense, still par-
tictpant with one another—the name a sort of emanation of the sensi-
ble entity. With the phonetic aleph-beth, however, the written
character no longer refers us to any sensible phenomenon out in the
world, or even to the name of such a phenomenon (as with the
rebus), but solely to a gesture to be made by the human mouth.
There is a concerted shift of attention away from any outward or
worldly reference of the pictorial image, away from the sensible phe-
nomenon that had previously called forth the spoken utterance, to
the shape of the utterance itself, now invoked directly by the written
character. A direct association is established between the pictorial sign
and the vocal gesture, for the first time completely bypassing the thing

Animism and the Alphabet 101

pictured. The evocative phenomena—the entities imaged—are no
longer a necessary part of the equation. Human utterances are now
elicited, directly, by human-made signs; the larger, more-than-human
life-world is no longer a part of the semiotic, no longer a necessary part
of the system.

Or is it? When we ponder the early Semitic aleph-beth, we readily
recognize its pictographic inheritance. Aleph, the first letter, is writ-
ten thus: & Aleph is also the ancient Hebrew word for “ox.” The
shape of the letter, we can see, was that of an ox’s head with horns;
turned over, it became our own letter 4.!3 The name of the Semitic
letter mem is also the Hebrew word for “water”; the letter, which
later became our own letter VM, was drawn as a series of waves: ™.
The letter ayin, which also means “eye” in Hebrew, was drawn as a
simple circle, the picture of an eye; it is this letter, made over into a
vowel by the Greek scribes, that eventually became our letter O. The
Hebrew letter goph, which is also the Hebrew term for “monkey,”
was drawn as a circle intersected by a long, dangling, tail P . Our
letter Q retains a sense of this simple picture.'*

These are a few examples. By thus comparing the names of the
letters with their various shapes, we discern that the letters of the
early aleph-beth are still implicitly tied to the more-than-human field
of phenomena. But these ties to other animals, to natural elements
like water and waves, and even to the body itself, are far more tenu-
ous than in the earlier, predominantly nonphonetic scripts. These
traces of sensible nature linger in the new script only as vestigial
holdovers from the old—they are no longer necessary participants in
the transfer of linguistic knowledge. The other animals, the plants,
and the natural elements—sun, moon, stars, waves—are beginning
to lose their own voices. In the Hebrew Genesis, the animals do not
speak their own names to Adam; rather, they are given their names
by this first man. Language, for the Hebrews, was becoming a purely
human gift, a human power.

IT WAS ONLY, HOWEVER, WITH THE TRANSFER OF PHONETIC WRIT-
ing to Greece, and the consequent transformation of the Semitic
aleph-beth into the Greek “alphabet,” that the progressive abstrac-
tion of linguistic meaning from the enveloping life-world reached a

102 ‘THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

type of completion. The Greek scribes took on, with slight modifi-
cations, both the shapes of the Semitic letters and their Semitic
names. Thus aleph—the name of the first letter, and the Hebrew
word for “ox”—became alpha; beth—the name of the second letter,
as well as the word for “house”—became beta; gimel—the third let-
ter, and the word for “camel,” became gamma, etc. But while the Se-
mitic names had older, nongrammatological meanings for those who
spoke a Semitic tongue, the Greek versions of those names had no
nongrammatological meaning whatsoever for the Greeks. That is,
while the Semitic name for the letter was also the name of the sen-
sorial entity commonly imaged by or associated with the letter, the
Greek name had no sensorial reference at all.!> While the Semitic
name had served as a reminder of the worldy origin of the letter, the
Greek name served only to designate the human-made letter itself.
The pictorial (or iconic) significance of many of the Semitic letters,
which was memorialized in their spoken names, was now readily
lost. The indebtedness of human language to the more-than-human
perceptual field, an indebtedness preserved in the names and shapes
of the Semitic letters, could now be entirely forgotten.

The Rapper's Rhythm

“".. [ma lover of learning, and trees and open country won’t teach
me anything, whereas men in the town do.” These words are pro-
nounced by Socrates, the wise and legendary father of Western phi-
losophy, early in the course of the Phaedrus—surely one of the most
eloquent and lyrical of the Platonic dialogues.'® Written by Socrates’
most illustrious student, Plato, these words inscribe a new and curi-
ous assumption at the very beginning of the European philosophical
tradition.

It is difficult to reconcile Socrates’ assertion—that trees and the
untamed country have nothing to teach—with the Greece that we
have come to know through Homer’s epic ballads. In the Homeric
songs the natural landscape itself bears the omens and signs that in-
struct human beings in their endeavors; the gods speak directly

Animism and the Alphabet 103

through the patterns of clouds, waves, and the flight of birds. Zeus
rouses storms, sends thunderclaps, dispatches eagles to swoop low
over the heads of men, disrupting their gatherings. Athena herself
may take the shape of a seahawk, or may stir a wind to fill a ship’s
sails. Proteus, “the ancient of the salt sea, who serves under Posei-
don,” can readily transform into any beast, or into a flaming fire, or
into water itself. Indeed, the gods seem indistinguishable at times
from the natural elements that display their power: Poseidon, “the
blue-maned god who makes the islands tremble,” is the very life and
fury of the sea itself; Helios, “lord of high noon,” is not distinct
from the sun (the fiery sun here a willful intelligence able even to
father children: Circe, the sorceress, is his daughter). Even “fair
Dawn, with her spreading fingertips of rose,” is a living power.
Human events and emotions are not yet distinct from the shifting
moods of the animate earth—an army’s sense of relief is made pal-
pable in a description of thick clouds dispersing from the land;
Nestor’s anguish is likened to the darkening of the sea before a gale;
the inward release of Penelope’s feelings on listening to news of her
husband is described as the thawing of the high mountain snows by
the warm spring winds, melting the frozen water into streams that
cascade down the slopes—as though the natural landscape was the
proper home of those emotions, or as though a common psyche
moved between humans and clouds and trees. When Odysseus, half-
drowned by Poseidon’s wrath and nearly dashed to pieces on the
rocky coast of Phaidkia, spies the mouth of a calm river between the
cliffs, he prays directly to the spirit of that river to have mercy and
offer him shelter—and straightaway the tide shifts, and the river
draws him into safety. Here, then, is a land that is everywhere alive
and awake, animated by a multitude of capricious but willful forces,
at times vengeful and at other times tender, yet always in some sense
responsive to human situations. The diverse forms of the earth still
speak and offer guidance to humankind, albeit in gestures that we
cannot always directly understand.!’

This participatory and animate earth contrasts vividly with the
dismissive view of nature espoused by Socrates in the Phaedrus. To
make sense of this contrast, it is necessary to realize that the Ho-
meric epics, probably written down in the seventhcentury B.C.E., are
essentially orally evolved creations, oral poems that had been sung

104 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

and resung, shifting and complexifying, long before they were writ-
ten down and thus frozen in the precise form in which we now know
them.!® The Platonic dialogues, on the other hand, written in the
first half of the fourth century B.C.E., are thoroughly lettered con-
structions, composed in a literate context by a manifestly literate au-
thor. And indeed they inscribe for the first time many of the mental
patterns or thought styles that today we of literate culture take for
granted.

The Greek alphabet was first invented—or, rather, adapted from
the Semitic aleph-beth—several centuries before Plato, probably
during the eighth century B.c.E.!? The new technology did not
spread rapidly through Greece; rather, it encountered remarkable
resistance in the form of a highly developed and ritualized oral cul-
ture.”? That is, the traditions of prealphabetic Greece were actively
preserved in numerous oral stories regularly recited and passed
along from generation to generation by the Greek bards, or “rhap-
sodes.” The chanted tales carried within their nested narratives
much of the accumulated knowledge of the culture. Since they were
not written down, they were never wholly fixed, but would shift in-
crementally with each telling to fit the circumstances or needs of a
particular audience, gradually incorporating new practical knowl-
edge while letting that which was obsolete fall away. The sung sto-
ries, along with the numerous ceremonies to which they were linked,
were in asense the living encyclopedias of the culture—carrying and
preserving the collected knowledge and established customs of the
community—and they themselves were preserved through constant
repetition and ritual reenactment. There was thus little overt need
for the new technology of reading and writing. According to literary
historian Eric Havelock, for the first two or three centuries after its
appearance in Greece, “[t]he alphabet was an interloper, lacking so-
cial standing and achieved use. The elite of society were all reciters
and performers. ”*!

The alphabet, after all, had not here developed gradually, as it
had across the Mediterranean, out of a series of earlier scripts, and
there was thus no already existing context of related inscriptions and
scribal practices for it to latch onto. Moreover, the oral techniques
for preserving and transmitting knowledge, and the sensorial habits
associated with those techniques, were, as we shall see, largely in-

Animism and the Alphabet 105

compatible with the sensorial patterns demanded by alphabetic lit-
eracy.

In aculture as thoroughly and complexly oral as Greek culture in
this period, the alphabet could take root only by allying itself, at
first, with the oral tradition. Thus, the first large written texts to ap-
pear in Greece—namely, the Iliad and the Odyssey—are, paradoxi-
ally, “oral texts.” That is, they are not written compositions, as had
long been supposed, but rather alphabetic transcriptions of orally
chanted poems. Homer, as an oral bard, or rhapsode (from the Greek
rhapsoidein, which meant “to stitch song together”), improvised the
precise form of the poems by “stitching together” an oral tapestry
from a vast fund of memorized epithets and formulaic phrases, em-
bellishing and elaborating a cycle of stories that had already been
variously improvised or “stitched together” by earlier bards since
the Trojan War itself.22

We owe our recognition of the oral nature of the Homeric epics
to the pioneering research undertaken by the Harvard classicist Mil-
man Parry and his assistant Albert Lord, in the 1930s.23 Parry had
noticed the existence of certain stock phrases—such as “the wine-
dark sea,” “there spoke clever Odysseus,” or “when Dawn spread
out her fingertips of rose”’—that are continually repeated through-
out the poems. Careful study revealed that the poems were com-
posed almost entirely of such expressions (in the twenty-seven
thousand hexameters there are twenty-nine thousand repetitions of
phrases with two or more words).”* Moreover, Homer’s choice of
one particular epithet or formula rather than another seemed at
times to be governed less by the exact meaning of the phrase than by
the metrical exigencies of the line; the bard apparently called upon
one specific formula after another in order to fit the driving meter of
the chant, in a trance of rhythmic improvisation. This is not at all to
minimize Homer’s genius, but simply to indicate that his poetic bril-
liance was performative as much as creative—less the genius of an
author writing a great novel than that of an inspired and eloquent
rap artist.

The reliance of the Homeric texts upon repeated verbal formulas
and stock epithets—this massive dependence upon that which we
today refer to, disparagingly, as “clichés” —offered Parry and subse-
quent researchers a first insight into the very different world of a

106 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

European culture without writing. In a literate society, like our own,
any verbal discovery or realization can be preserved simply by being
written down. Whenever we wish to know how to accomplish a cer-
tain task, we need only find the book wherein that knowledge is in-
scribed. When we wish to ponder a particular historical encounter,
we simply locate the text wherein that encounter is recorded. Oral
cultures, however, lacking the fixed and permanent record that we
have come to count on, can preserve verbal knowledge only by con-
stantly repeating it. Practical knowledge must be embedded in spo-
ken formulas that can be easily recalled—in prayers and proverbs, in
continually recited legends and mythic stories. The rhythmic nature
of many such spoken formulas is a function of their mnemonic
value; such pulsed phrases are much easier for the pulsing, breathing
body to assimilate and later recall than the strictly prosaic state-
ments that appear only after the advent of literacy. (For example, the
phrase “an apple a day keeps the doctor away” is vastly easier to re-
member than the phrase “one should always eat fruit in order to stay
healthy”). The discourse of nonwriting cultures is, of necessity,
largely comprised of such formulaic and rhythmic phrases, which
readily spring to the tongue in appropriate situations.”°

Parry’s insights regarding the orally composed nature of the
Homeric epics remained somewhat speculative until he was able to
neet and observe representatives of an actual bardic tradition still in
existence in Eastern Europe. In the 1930s, Parry and his student Al-
bert Lord traveled to Serbia, where they befriended a number of
nonliterate Slavic singers whose craft was still rooted in the ancient
oral traditions of the Balkans. These singers (or guslars) chanted
their long stories—for which there existed no written texts—in cof-
feehouses and at weddings, accompanying themselves on a simple
stringed instrument called a gusla. Parry and Lord recorded many of
these epic songs on early phonographic disks,”° and so were later able
to compare the metrical structure of these chanted stories with the
structure and phrasing of the Homeric poems. The parallels were
clear and remarkable.’

When one hears the Southern Slavs sing their tales he has the
overwhelming feeling that, in some way, he is hearing Homer.
This is no mere sentimental feeling that comes from his seeing a

Animism and the Alphabet 107

way of life and a cast of thought that are strange to him....
When the hearer looks closely to see why he should seem to be
hearing Homer he finds precise reasons: he is ever hearing the
same ideas that Homer expresses, and is hearing them expressed
in phrases which are rhythmically the same, and which are
grouped in the same order.”®

Parry carefully documented these strong parallels, and after his
early death his research into oral modes of composition was carried
on by Albert Lord. Among other things, Lord’s research indicated
that learning to read and write thoroughly disabled the oral poet, ru-

ining his capacity for oral improvisation.”°

WHEN THE HOMERIC EPICS WERE RECORDED IN WRITING, THEN THE
art of the rhapsodes began’‘to lose its preservative and instructive
function. The knowledge embedded in the epic stories and myths
was now captured for the first time in a visible and fixed form, which
could be returned to, examined, and even questioned. Indeed, it was
only then, under the slowly spreading influence of alphabetic tech-
nology, that “language” was beginning to separate itself from the an-
imate flux of the world, and so becoming a ponderable presence in
its own right.

It is only as language is written down that it becomes possible to
think about it. The acoustic medium, being incapable of visual-
ization, did not achieve recognition as a phenomenon wholly sep-
arable from the person who used it. But in the alphabetized
document the medium became objectified. There it was, repro-
duced perfectly in the alphabet ...no longer just a function of
“me” the speaker but a document with an independent exis-
tence.*°

The scribe, or author, could now begin to dialogue with his own vis-
ible inscriptions, viewing and responding to his own words even as
he wrote them down. A new power of reflexivity was thus coming into
existence, borne by the relation between the scribe and his scripted text.
We can witness the gradual spread of this new power in the writ-

108 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

ten fragments of the pre-Socratic philosophers of the sixth and fifth
centuries B.C.E. These thinkers are still under the sway of the oral-
poetic mode of discourse—their teachings are commonly couched
in an aphoristic or poetic form, and their attention is still turned
toward the sensuous terrain that surrounds them. Nevertheless, they
seem to stand at a new distance from the natural order, their
thoughts inhabiting a different mode of temporality from the flux of
nature, which they now question and strive to understand. The writ-
ten fragments of Heraclitus or of Empedocles give evidence of a
radically new, literate reflection combined with a more traditional,
oral preoccupation with a sensuous nature still felt to be mysteri-
ously animate and alive, filled with immanent powers. In the words
of the pre-Socratic philosopher Thales, “all things are full of gods.”*!

It was not until the early fourth century B.C.E. that such numi-
nous powers, or gods, were largely expelled from the natural sur-
roundings. For it was only at this time that alphabetic literacy
became a collective reality in Greece. Indeed, it was only during
Plato’s lifetime (428-348 B.c.E.) that the alphabet was incorporated
within Athenian life to the extent that we might truthfully speak of
Athenian Greece as a “literate” culture:

Plato, in the early fourth century B.C., stands on the threshold be-
tween the oral and written cultures of Greece. The earliest epi-
graphic and iconographic indications of young boys being taught
to write date from Plato’s childhood. In his day, people had al-
ready been reciting Homer from the text for centuries. But the art
of writing was still primarily a handicraft... . In the fifth century
B.c., craftsmen began to acquire the art of carving or engraving
letters of the alphabet. But writing was still not a part of recog-
nized instruction: the most a person was expected to be able to

write and spell was his own name. . . .*

Plato was teaching, then, precisely at the moment when the new
technology of reading and writing was shedding its specialized
“craft” status and finally spreading, by means of the Greek curricu-
lum, into the culture at large. The significance of this conjunction
has not been well recognized by Western philosophers, all of whom
stand—to a greater or lesser extent—within Plato’s lineage. Plato, or

Animism and the Alphabet 109

rather the association between the literate Plato and his mostly non-
literate teacher Socrates (469?—399 B.C.E.), may be recognized as the
hinge on which the sensuous, mimetic, profoundly embodied style
of consciousness proper to orality gave way to the more detached,
abstract mode of thinking engendered by alphabetic literacy. In-
deed, it was Plato who carefully developed and brought to term the
collective thought-structures appropriate to the new technology.

An Eternity of unchanging Ideas

Although Socrates himself may have been able to write little more
than his own name, he made brilliant use of the new reflexive capac-
ity introduced by the alphabet. Eric Havelock has suggested that the
famed “Socratic dialectic”’—which, in its simplest form, consisted in
asking a speaker to explain what he has said—was primarily a
method for disrupting the mimetic thought patterns of oral culture.
The speaker’s original statement, if it concerned important matters
of morality and social custom, would necessarily have been a mem-
orized formula, a poetic or proverbial phrase, which presented a
vivid example of the matter being discussed. By asking the speaker
to explain himself or to repeat his statement in different terms,
Socrates forced his interlocutors to separate themselves, for the first
time, from their own words—to separate themselves, that is, from
the phrases and formulas that had become habitual through the con-
stant repetition of traditional teaching stories. Prior to this moment,
spoken discourse was inseparable from the endlessly repeated sto-
ries, legends, and myths that provided many of the spoken phrases
one needed in one’s daily actions and interactions. To speak was to
live within a storied universe, and thus to feel one’s closeness to
those protagonists and ancestral heroes whose words often seemed
to speak through one’s own mouth. Such, as we have said, is the way
culture preserves itself in the absence of written records. But
Socrates interrupted all this. By continually asking his interlocutors
to repeat and explain what they had said in other words, by getting
them thus to listen to and ponder their own speaking, Socrates

110 = =©‘THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

stunned his listeners out of the mnemonic trance demanded by oral-
ity, and hence out of the sensuous, storied realm to which they were
accustomed. Small wonder that some Athenians complained that
Socrates’ conversation had the numbing effect of a stingray’s elec-
tric shock.

Prior tothe spread of writing, ethical qualities like “virtue,” “jus-
tice,” and “temperance” were thoroughly entwined with the specific
situations in which those qualities were exhibited. The terms for
such qualities were oral utterances called forth by particular social
situations; they had no apparent existence independent of those sit-
uations. As utterances, they slipped back into the silence immedi-
ately after they were spoken; they had no permanent presence to the
senses. “Justice” and “temperance” were thus experienced as living
occurrences, as events. Arising in specific situations, they were insep-
arable from the particular persons or actions that momentarily em-
bodied them.

Yet as soon as such utterances were recorded in writing, they ac-
quired an autonomy and a permanence hitherto unknown. Once
written down, “virtue” was seen to have an unchanging, visible form
independent of the speaker—and independent as well of the corpo-
real situations and individuals that exhibited it.

Socrates clearly aligned his method with this shift in the percep-
tual field. Whenever, in Plato’s dialogues, Socrates asks his in-
terlocutor to give an account of what “virtue,” or “justice,” or
“courage” actually is, questioning them regarding the real meaning
of the qualitative terms they unthinkingly employ in their speaking,
they confidently reply by recounting particular instances of the
quality under consideration, enumerating specific examples of “jus-
tice,” yet never defining “justice” itself. When Socrates invites Meno
to say what “virtue” is, Meno readily enumerates so many different
instances or embodiments of virtue that Socrates retorts sardon-
ically: “I seem to be in luck. I only asked you for one thing, virtue,
but you have given me a whole swarm of virtues.”*? In keeping with
older, oral modes of discourse, Socrates’ fellow Athenians cannot
abstract these spoken qualities from the lived situations that seem to
exemplify these terms and call them forth. Socrates, however, has
little interest in these multiple embodiments of “virtue,” except in
so far as they all partake of some common, unchanging element,

Animism and the Alphabet 111

which he would like to abstract and ponder on its own. In every case
Socrates attempts to induce a reflection upon the quality as it exists
in itself, independent of particular circumstances. The specific em-
bodiments of “justice” that we may encounter in the material world
are necessarily variable and fleeting; genuine knowledge, claims
Socrates, must be of what is eternal and unchanging.

Socrates, then, is clearly convinced that there is a fixed, unchang-
ing essence of “justice” that unites all the just instances, as there is
an eternal essence of “virtue,” of “beauty,” of “goodness,” “cour-
age,” and all the rest. Yet Socrates’ conviction would not be possible
without the alphabet. For only when a qualitative term is written
down does it become ponderable as a fixed form independent of
both the speakers and of situations.**

Not all writing systems foster this thorough abstraction of a spo-
ken quality from its embeddedness in corporeal situations. The
ideographic script of China, as we have seen, still retains pictorial
ties to the phenomenal world of sensory experience. Thus, the Chi-
nese ideograph for “red” is itself a juxtaposition of lived examples;
it is composed of abbreviated pictorial images of a rose, a cherry,
iron rust, and a flamingo. And indeed, according to some observers,
if one asks a cultured person in China to explain a general quality
like “red,” or “loyalty,” or “happiness,” she will likely reply by de-
scribing various instances or examples of that quality, much like
Socrates’ interlocutors.*> It was not writing per se, but phonetic
writing, and the Greek alphabet in particular, that enabled the ab-
straction of previously ephemeral qualities like “goodness” and
“justice” from their inherence in situations, promoting them to a
new realm independent of the flux of ordinary experience. For the
Greek alphabet had effectively severed all ties between the written
letters and the sensible world from which they were derived; it was
the first writing system able to render almost any human utterance
in a fixed and lasting form.

While Socrates focused his teaching on the moral qualities, his
disciple Plato recognized that not just ephemeral qualities but all
general terms, from “table” to “cloud,” could now be pondered as
eternal, unchanging forms. In retrospect, we can see that the alpha-
bet had indeed granted a new autonomy and permanence to all such
terms. Besides the various meandering rivers, for instance, that one

112 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

could view, or wade through, in the sensible world, there was also the
singular notion “river,” which now had its own visibility; “river” it-
self could now be pondered apart from all those material rivers that
were liable to change their course or to dry up from one season to the
next. For Plato, as for his teacher, genuine knowledge must be of
what is unchanging and eternal—there can be no “true” knowledge
of a particular river, but only of the pure Idea (or ezdos) “river.” That
Plato often used the Greek term ezdos (which meant “visible shape or
form”) to refer to such unchanging essences is itself, I believe, an in-
dication of the affinity between these eternal essences and the un-
changing, visible shapes of the alphabet.

For the letters of the alphabet, like the Platonic Ideas, do not exist in
the world of ordinary vision. The letters, and the written words that
they present, are not subject to the flux of growth and decay, to the
perturbations and cyclical changes common to other visible things;
they seem to hover, as it were, in another, strangely timeless dimen-
sion. Further, the letters defer and dissimulate their common visi-
bility, each one dissolving into sound even as we look at it, trading
our eyes for our ears, so that we seem not to be seeing so much as
hearing something. Alphabetic writing deflects our attention from its
visible aspect, effectively vanishing behind the current of human
speech that it provokes.*°

As we have already seen, the process of learning to read and to
write with the alphabet engenders a new, profoundly reflexive, sense
of self. The capacity to view and even to dialogue with one’s own
words after writing them down, or even in the process of writing
them down, enables a new sense of autonomy and independence
from others, and even from the sensuous surroundings that had ear-
lier been one’s constant interlocutor. The fact that one’s scripted
words can be returned to and pondered at any time that one chooses,
regardless of when, or in what situation, they were first recorded,
grants a timeless quality to this new reflective self, a sense of the rel-
ative independence of one’s verbal, speaking self from the breathing
body with its shifting needs. The literate self cannot help but feel its
own transcendence and timelessness relative to the fleeting world of
corporeal experience.

This new, seemingly autonomous, reflective awareness is called,
by Socrates, the psyché, a term he thus twists from its earlier,

Animism and the Alphabet 113

Homeric significance as the invisible breath that animates the living
body and that remains, as kind of wraith or ghost, after the body’s
death. (The term psyché was derived from an older Greek term,
psychein, which meant “to breathe” or “to blow”.) For Plato, as for
Socrates, the psyché is now that aspect of oneself that is refined and
strengthened by turning away from the ordinary sensory world in
order to contemplate the intelligible Ideas, the pure and eternal
forms that, alone, truly exist. The Socratic-Platonic psyché, in other
words, is none other than the literate intellect, that part of the self
that is born and strengthened in relation to the written letters.*”

PLATO HIMSELF EFFECTS A POWERFUL CRITIQUE OF THE INFLUENCE
of writing in the Phaedrus, that dialogue from which I quoted earlier
in this chapter. In the course of that dialogue, Socrates relates to the
young Phaedrus a curious legend regarding the Egyptian king
Thamus. According to this story, Thamus was approached directly
by the god Thoth—the divine inventor of geometry, mathematics,
astronomy, and writing—who offers writing as a gift to the king so
that Thamus may offer it, in turn, to the Egyptian people. But
Thamus, after considering both the beneficent and the baneful as-
pects of the god’s inventions, concludes that his people will be much
better off without writing, and so he refuses the gift. Against Thoth’s
claim that writing will make people wiser and improve their mem-
ory, the king asserts that the very opposite is the case:

If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they
will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is
written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within
themselves, but by means of external marks.*8

Moreover—according to the king—spoken teachings, once written
down, easily find their way into the hands of those who will mis-
understand those teachings while nevertheless thinking that they un-
derstand them. Thus, the written letters bring not wisdom but only
“the conceit of wisdom,” making men seem to know much when in
fact they know little.??

Plato’s Socrates clearly agrees with the king’s judgment, and it is

114 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

evident that Plato wishes the reader to take these criticisms of writ-
ing quite seriously. Later in the same dialogue we read that “a writ-
ten discourse on any subject is bound to contain much that is
fanciful,” and that in any case “nothing that has ever been written
whether in verse or prose merits much serious attention.”*° Cer-
tainly, it is strange to read such strong remarks against writing from
a thinker whose numerous written texts are among the most widely
distributed and worshipfully read in the Western world. Here is
Plato, from whom virtually all Western philosophers draw their lit-
erary ancestry, disparaging writing as nothing more than a pastime!
What are we to make of these statements?

Such doubts about the alphabet, and such assertions regarding its
potentially debilitating effects, must have been legion in Athens just
before or during the time that Plato was writing. It is remarkable
that Plato held to such criticisms despite the fact that he was an in-
veterate participant in the alphabetic universe. Given his multiple
and diverse writings, which constitute what is probably the first
large corpus of prose by a single author in the history of the alpha-
bet, it seems clear that Plato did not intend his own criticisms to dis-
suade his students and readers from writing, or from reading him
further. Rather, it is as though he meant to build into the very body
of his writings a caution that they not be given too much weight. Not
because he was uncertain about the genuine and serious worth of his
philosophy, but simply because he had strong reservations about the
written word and its ability to convey the full meaning of a philoso-
phy that was as much a practice—involving direct, personal interac-
tion and instruction—as it was a set of static formulations and
reflections. Writing, according to Socrates, can at best serve as a re-
minder to a reader who already knows those things that have been
written.*! It is possible that Plato wrote his various dialogues to
serve just such a restricted function; to act as reminders, for the stu-
dents of his academy, of the methods and insights that they first
learned in direct, face-to-face dialogue with their teacher.

Nevertheless Plato, despite his cautions, did not recognize the ex-
tent to which the very content of his teaching—with its dependence
upon the twin notions of a purely rational psyché and a realm of eter-
nal, unchanging Ideas—was already deeply under the influence of
alphabetic writing. In the early fourth century B.C.E., when literacy

Animism and the Alphabet 115

was gradually spreading throughout Athenian society, it was cer-
tainly possible to witness the impact that writing was having upon
the dissemination of particular teachings. An astute observer might
discern as well the debilitating effects of writing upon the collective
practice of memory, as what had previously been accomplished
through the memorized repetition of ritual poems, songs, and stories
was transferred to an external and fixed artifact. But it was hardly
possible to discern the pervasive influence of letters upon patterns of
perception and contemplation in general. Similarly, today we are
simply unable to discern with any clarity the manner in which our
own perceptions and thoughts are being shifted by our sensory in-
volvement with electronic technologies, since any thinking that seeks
to discern such a shift is itself subject to the very effect that it strives
to thematize. Nevertheless, we may be sure that the shapes of our
consciousness are shifting in tandem with the technologies that en-
gage our senses—much as we can now begin to discern, in retro-
spect, how the distinctive shape of Western philosophy was born of

- the meeting between the human senses and the alphabet in ancient
Greece.

of Tongues in Trees

Socrates’ critique of writing, in the Phaedrus, is occasioned by a
written text carried by the young Phaedrus at the very beginning of
the dialogue, when Socrates encounters him on his way out of the
city. Phaedrus has just heard a friend of his, Lysias, declaiming a
newly written speech on the topic of love; impressed by Lysias’s
speech, Phaedrus has obtained a copy of the speech and is going for
a walk outside the city walls to ponder the text at his leisure.
Socrates, always eager for philosophical discourse, agrees to accom-
pany Phaedrus into the open country where they may together con-
sider Lysias’s text and discuss its merits. It is summer; the two men
walk along the Ilissus River, wade across it, then settle on the grass
in the shade of a tall, spreading plane tree. Socrates compliments
Phaedrus for leading them to this pleasant glen, and Phaedrus

116 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

replies, with some incredulity, that Socrates seems wholly a stranger
to the country, like one who had hardly ever set foot outside the city
walls. It is then that Socrates explains himself: “You must forgive
me, dear friend. I’m a lover of learning, and trees and open country
won’t teach me anything, whereas men in the town do.”*?

We have already seen how peculiar this statement seems in rela-
tion to the world of the Homeric poems. How much more bizarre
Socrates’ words would seem to the members of an oral society still
less exposed to the influence of literate traders than was Homeric
Greece—to a culture, in other words, whose gods were not yet as an-
thropomorphic as even frothy-haired Poseidon and eruptive He-
phaestus. The claim that “trees and open country won’t teach
anything” would have scant coherence within an indigenous hunting
community, for the simple reason that such communities necessarily
take their most profound teachings or instructions directly from the
more-than-human earth. Whether among the Plains Indians of
North America, the bushmen of the Kalahari Desert, or the Pintupi
of the Australian outback, the elders and “persons of high degree”
within such hunting communities continually defer to the animate
powers of the surrounding landscape—to those nonhuman powers
from which they themselves draw their deepest inspiration.

When a young person within such a culture is chosen, by what-
ever circumstance, to become a seer or shaman for the community,
he or she may be trained by an elder seer within the tribe. Yet the
most learned and powerful shaman will be one who has first learned
his or her skills directly from the land itself—from a specific animal
or plant, from a river or a storm—during a prolonged sojourn out
beyond the boundaries of the human society. Indeed, among many
of the tribes once indigenous to North America, a boy could gain the
insight necessary to enter the society of grown men only by under-
taking a solitary quest for vision—only by rendering himself vulner-
able to the wild forces of the land and, if need be, crying to those
forces fora vision.’ The initiatory “Walkabout” undertaken by Abo-
riginal Australians is again just such an act whereby oral peoples
turn toward the more-than-human earth for the teachings that must
vitalize and sustain the human community.

In indigenous, oral cultures, nature itself is articulate; it speaks.
The human voice in an oral culture is always to some extent partici-

Animism and the Alphabet 117

pant with the voices of wolves, wind, and waves—participant, that
is, with the encompassing discourse of an animate earth. There is no
element of the landscape that is definitively void of expressive reso-
nance and power: any movement may be a gesture, any sound may
be a voice, a meaningful utterance.

Socrates’ claim that trees have nothing to teach is a vivid indica-
tor of the extent to which the human senses in Athens had already
withdrawn from direct participation with the natural landscape. To
directly perceive any phenomenon is to enter into relation with it, to
feel oneself in a living interaction with another being. To define the
phenomenon as an inert object, to deny the ability of a tree to inform
and even instruct one’s awareness, is to have turned one’s senses
away from that phenomenon. It is to ponder the tree from outside of
its world, or, rather, from outside of the world in which both oneself
and the tree are active participants.

Yet even here Plato seems to waver and vacillate. Indeed, just as
the Phaedrus is the prime locus of Plato’s apparent ambivalence with
regard to his own practice of writing, so it is also the locus of a pro-
found ambivalence with regard to nature, or to the expressive power
of the natural world. Although the dialogue opens with Socrates’
disparagement of trees and the open countryside, it is significant
that the dialogue itself takes place in the midst of that very country-
side. Unlike the other Platonic dialogues, the Phaedrus alone occurs
outside the walls of the city, out beyond the laws and formalities that
enclose and isolate the human community from the more-than-
human earth. Socrates and Phaedrus have themselves embarked,
as it were, on a kind of vision quest, stepping outside the city norms
in order to test their citified knowledge against the older knowings
embedded in the land. Plato is here, in a sense, putting philosophy
itself to the test, by opening and exposing it to the nonhuman pow-
ers that for so long had compelled the awe and attention of hu-
mankind. In direct contrast to The Republic, in which Plato vilifies
the ancient gods and effectively banishes the oral poets and story-
tellers from the utopian city that he envisions, in the Phaedrus, Plato
brings philosophy itself outside the city, there to confront and
come to terms with the older, oral ways of knowing which, although
they may be banished from the city, nevertheless still dwell in the
surrounding countryside. It is only outside the city walls that Plato

118 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

will allow himself to question and critique the practice of writing to
which he (and all later philosophy) is indissolubly tied. And it is
only outside those walls that he will allow himself to fully acknowl-
edge and offer respect to the oral, animistic universe that is on the
wane.

Thus, shortly after his assertion that trees can teach him nothing,
Socrates allows himself to be goaded into making an impromptu
speech by an oath that Phaedrus swears upon the spirit of the very
tree beneath which they sit!** Trees, it would seem, still retain a
modicum of efficacious power. Later in the dialogue Socrates him-
self will remind Phaedrus that, according to tradition, “the first
prophetic utterances came from an oak tree.”*>

Not just trees but animals, too, have—in the Phaedrus—magical
powers. Socrates initiates the discussion of writing by speculating
that the cicadas chirping and “conversing with one another” in the
tree overhead are probably observing the two of them as well; he
maintains that the cicadas will intercede with the Muses on their be
half if he and Phaedrus continue to converse on philosophical mat-
ters.*° And he proceeds to recount a story that describes how the
cicadas, who were originally persons, were transformed into their
present form:

The story is that once upon a time these creatures were men—
men of an age before there were any Muses—and that when the
latter came into the world, and music made its appearance, some
of the people of those days were so thrilled with pleasure that
they went on singing and quite forgot to eat and drink until they
actually died without noticing it. From them in due course
sprang the race of cicadas, to which the Muses have granted the
boon of needing no sustenance right from their birth, but of
singing from the very first, without food or drink, until the day of
their death, after which they go and report to the Muses how they
severally are paid honor among mankind and by whom. .. .*”

Any student of indigenous, oral cultures will hear a ring of famil-
iarity in this tale. The story of the cicadas is identical in its charac-
ter to the stories of the “Distant Time” told today by the Koyukon
Indians of Alaska, identical to stories from that mysterious realm

Animism and the Alphabet 119

“long ago, in the future” which are told by the Inuit (or eastern
Eskimo), or to the “Dreamtime” stories told by Aboriginal Aus-
tralians. We may recall, in this context, these Inuit words quoted
toward the end of the last chapter: “In the very earliest time,
when both people and animals lived on earth, a person could be-
come an animal if he wanted to, and an animal could become a
human being... .” Here is a typical Distant Time story told by the
Koyukon:

When the burbot [ling cod] was human, he decided to leave the
land and become a water animal. So he started down the bank,
taking a piece of bear fat with him. But the other animal people
wanted him to stay and tried to hold him back, stretching him all
out of shape in the process. This is why the burbot has such a
long, stretched-out body, and why its liver is rich and oily like the
bear fat its ancestor carried to the water long ago."®

Like all oral stories of the Distant Time or Dreamtime, Socrates’
myth of the cicadas is a functional myth; it serves to explain certain
observed characteristics of the cicadas, like their endless humming
and buzzing, and their apparent lack of any need for nourishment
(“when music appeared, some of the people of those days were so
thrilled with pleasure that they went on singing, and quite forgot to
eat and drink”). Anthropologists have tended to view such stories
from the Dreamtime or Distant Time as confused attempts at causal
explanation by the primitive mind. Here, however, in the light of
our discussion regarding orality and literacy, such stories can be seen
to serve a far more practical function.

Without a versatile writing system, there is simply no way to pre-
serve, in any fixed, external medium, the accumulated knowledge re-
garding particular plants (including where to find them, which parts
of them are edible, which poisonous, how they are best prepared, .
what ailments they may cure or exacerbate), and regarding specific
animals (how to recognize them, what they eat, how best to track or
hunt them), or even regarding the land itself (how best to orient
oneself in the surrounding terrain, what landforms to avoid, where
to find water or fuel). Such practical knowledge must be preserved,
then, in spoken formulations that can be easily remembered, modi-

120 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

fied when new facts are learned, and retold from generation to gen-
eration. Yet not all verbal formulations are amenabie to simple re-
call—most verbal forms that we are conversant with today are
dependent upon a context of writing. To us, for instance, a simple
mental list of the known characteristics of a particular plant or ani-
mal would seem the easiest and most obvious formulation. Yet such
lists have no value in an oral culture; without a visible counterpart
that can be brought to mind and scanned by the mind’s eye, spoken
lists cannot be readily recalled and repeated.*? Without writing,
knowledge of the diverse properties of particular animals, plants,
and places can be preserved only by being woven into stories, into
vital tales wherein the specific characteristics of the plant are made
evident through a narrated series of events and interactions. Stories,
like rhymed poems or songs, readily incorporate themselves into our
felt experience; the shifts of action echo and resonate our own en-
counters—in hearing or telling the story we vicariously Jive it, and
the travails of its characters embed themselves into our own flesh.
The sensuous, breathing body is, as we have seen, a dynamic, ever-
unfolding form, more a process than a fixed or unchanging object.
As such, it cannot readily appropriate inert “facts” or “data” (static
nuggets of “information” abstracted from the lived situations in
which they arise). Yet the living body can easily assimilate other dy-
namic or eventful processes, like the unfolding of a story, appropri-
ating each episode or event as a variation of its own unfolding.

And the more lively the story—the more vital or stirring the en-
counters within it—the more readily it will be in-corporated.*° Oral
memorization calls for lively, dynamic, often violent, characters and
encounters. If the story carries knowledge about a particular plant
or natural element, then that entity will often be cast, like all of the
other characters, in a fully animate form, capable of personlike ad-
ventures and experiences, susceptible to the kinds of setbacks or dif-
ficulties that we know from our own lives. In this manner the
character or personality of a medicinal plant will be easily remem-
bered, its poisonous attributes will be readily avoided, and the pre-
cise steps in its preparation will be evident from the sequence of
events in the very legend that one chants while preparing it. One has
only to recite the appropriate story, from the Distant Time, about a
particular plant, animal, or element in order to recall the accumu-

Antmism and the Alphabet 121

lated cultural knowledge regarding that entity and its relation to the
human community.

In this light, that which we literates misconstrue as a naive at-
tempt at causal explanation may be recognized as a sophisticated
mnemonic method whereby precise knowledge is preserved and
passed along from generation to generation. The only causality
proper to such stories is a kind of cyclical causality alien to modern
thought, according to which persons may influence events in the en-
veloping natural order and yet are themselves continually under the
influence of those very events. By invoking a dimension or a time
when all entities were in human form, or when humans were in the
shape of other animals and plants, these stories affirm human kin-
ship with the multiple forms of the surrounding terrain. They thus
indicate the respectful, mutual relations that must be maintained
with natural phenomena, the reciprocity that must be practiced in
relation to other animals, plants, and the land itself, in order to en-
sure one’s own health and to preserve the well-being of the human
community.

This facet of respectful consideration, and its attendant circular
causality, is also present in Socrates’ tale of the cicadas. By relat-
ing the tale to Phaedrus, Socrates indicates, although not without
a sense of irony, the respect that is properly due to such insects,
who might confer a boon upon the two of them in return. Later,
indeed, Socrates will attribute his own loquacious eloquence in this
dialogue to the inspiration of the cicadas, “those mouthpieces of the
Muses.”*!

It seems clear that in the Phaedrus, Plato accords much more con-
sideration to the oral-poetic universe, with its surplus of irrational,
sensuous, and animistic powers, than he does in other dialogues.
The Phaedrus seems to attempt a reconciliation of the transcendent,
bodiless world of eternal Ideas proposed in this and other dialogues
with the passionate, feeling-toned world of natural magic that still
lingered in the common language of his day. But this conciliatory af-
firmation of the animistic, sensuous universe is effected only within
the context of a more subtle devaluation. This is most obviously ev-
ident in the allegory at the heart of the dialogue, wherein Socrates
gives his own account of love, or “eros.” According to Socrates, the
divine madness of love is to be honored and praised, for it is love

122 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

that can most powerfully awaken the soul from its slumber 1n the
bodily world. The lover’s soul is stirred by the sensuous beauty of
the beloved into remembering, however faintly, the more pure, gen-
uine beauty of the eternal, bodiless Ideas which it once knew. Thus
reminded of its own transcendent nature, the previously dormant
soul begins to sprout wings, and soon aspires to rise beyond this
world of ceaseless “becoming” toward that changeless eternal realm
beyond the stars:

It is there that true being dwells, without color or shape, that can-
not be touched; reason alone, the soul’s pilot, can behold it, and
all true knowledge is knowledge thereof. *?

In this dialogue, then, the bodily desire for sensuous contact and
communion with other bodies and with the bodily earth is honored,
but only as an incitement or spur toward the more genuine union of
the reasoning soul with the eternal forms of “justice,” “temper-
ance,” “virtue,” and the like, which—according to Plato—lie beyond
the sensory world entirely.

We have seen that this affinity between the reasoning soul or psy-
ché and the changeless Ideas is inseparable from the relation between
the new, literate intellect and the visible letters of the alphabet
(which, although not outside of the sensory world, do present an en-
tirely new and stable order of phenomena, relative to which all other
phenomenal forms may come to seem remarkedly fleeting, ambigu-
ous, and derivative). Just as Plato’s apparent criticisms of alphabetic
writing in the Phaedrus take place within the context of a much
broader espousal of the detached (or disembodied) reflection that
writing engenders, so in the same dialogue his apparent affirmation
of oral-animistic modes of experience is accomplished only in the
context of a broader disparagement. The erotic, participatory world
of the sensing body is conjured forth only to be subordinated to the
incorporeal world toward which, according to Plato, it points. The
literate intellect here certifies its dominion by claiming the sensuous
life of the body-in-nature as its subordinate ally. What was pre-
viously a threat to the literate mind’s clean ascendance is now
disarmed by being given a place within the grand project of tran-
scendence. Hence, even and especially in this most pastoral of dia-

Animism and the Alphabet 123

logues, in which the rational intellect seems almost balanced by the
desiring body, and in which trees that “can teach nothing” seem bal-
anced by watchful cicadas, we may still discern the seeds of nature’s
eventual eclipse behind a world of letters, numbers, and texts.

synaesthesia and the Encounter with the other

It is remarkable that none of the major twentieth-century scholars
who have directed their attention to the changes wrought by literacy
have seriously considered the impact of writing—and, in particular,
phonetic writing—upon the human experience of the wider natural
world. Their focus has generally centered upon the influence of
phonetic writing on the structure and deployment of human lan-
guage,’ on patterns of cognition and thought,” or upon the internal
organization of human societies.*> Most of the major research, in
other words, has focused upon the alphabet’s impact on processes e1-
ther internal to human society or presumably “internal” to the
human mind. Yet the limitation of such research—its restriction
within the bounds of human social interaction and personal interi-
ority—itself reflects an anthropocentric bias wholly endemic to al-
phabetic culture. In the absence of phonetic literacy, neither society,
nor language, nor even the experience of “thought” or conscious-
ness, can be pondered in isolation from the multiple nonhuman
shapes and powers that lend their influence to all our activities (we
need think only of our ceaseless involvement with the ground un-
derfoot, with the air that swirls around us, with the plants and ani-
mals that we consume, with the daily warmth of the sun and the
cyclic pull of the moon). Indeed, in the absence of formal writing
systems, human communities come to know themselves primarily as
they are reflected back by the animals and the animate landscapes
with which they are directly engaged. This epistemological depen-
dence is readily evidenced, on every continent, by the diverse modes
of identification commonly categorized under the single term
“totemism.”

It is exceedingly difficult for us literates to experience anything

124 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

approaching the vividness and intensity with which surrounding na-
ture spontaneously presents itself to the members of an indigenous,
oral community. Yet as we saw in the previous chapters, Merleau-
Ponty’s careful phenomenology of perceptual experience had begun
to disclose, underneath all of our literate abstractions, a deeply par-
ticipatory relation to things and to the earth, a felt reciprocity curi-
ously analogous to the animistic awareness of indigenous, oral
persons. If we wish to better comprehend the remarkable shift in the
human experience of nature that was occasioned by the advent and
spread of phonetic literacy, we would do well to return to the inti-
mate analysis of sensory perception inaugurated by Merleau-Ponty.
For without a clear awareness of what reading and writing amounts
to when considered at the level of our most immediate, bodily expe-
rience, any “theory” regarding the impact of literacy can only be
provisional and speculative.

Although Merleau-Ponty himself never attempted a phenome-
nology of reading or writing, his recognition of the importance of
synaesthesia—the overlap and intertwining of the senses—resulted
in a number of experiential analyses directly pertinent to the phe-
nomenon of reading. For reading, as soon as we attend to its sensor-
ial texture, discloses itself as a profoundly synaesthetic encounter.
Our eyes converge upon a visible mark, or a series of marks, yet what
they find there is a sequence not of images but of sounds, something
heard; the visible letters, as we have said, trade our eyes for our ears.
Or, rather, the eye and the ear are brought together at the surface of
the text—a new linkage has been forged between seeing and hearing
which ensures that a phenomenon apprehended by one sense is in-
stantly transposed into the other. Further, we should note that this
sensory transposition is mediated by the human mouth and tongue;
it is not just any kind of sound that is experienced in the act of read-
ing, but specifically human, vocal sounds—those which issue from
the human mouth. It is important to realize that the now common
experience of “silent” reading is a late development in the story of
the alphabet, emerging only during the Middle Ages, when spaces
were first inserted between the words in a written manuscript (along
with various forms of punctuation), enabling readers to distinguish
the words of a written sentence without necessarily sounding them
out audibly. Before this innovation, to read was necessarily to read

Animism and the Alphabet 125

aloud, or at the very least to mumble quietly; after the twelfth cen-
tury it became increasingly possible to internalize the sounds, to lis-
ten inwardly to phantom words (or the inward echo of words once
uttered).°°

Alphabetic reading, then, proceeds by way of a new synaesthetic
collaboration between the eye and the ear, between seeing and hear-
ing. To discern the consequences of this new synaesthesia, we need
to examine the centrality of synaesthesia in our perception of others
and of the earth.

The experiencing body (as we saw in chapter 2) is not a self-
enclosed object, but an open, incomplete entity. This openness is
evident in the arrangement of the senses: I have these multiple ways
of encountering and exploring the world—listening with my ears,
touching with my skin, seeing with my eyes, tasting with my tongue,
smelling with my nose—and all of these various powers or pathways
continually open outward from the perceiving body, like different
paths diverging from a forest. Yet my experience of the world is not
fragmented; I do not commonly experience the visible appearance of
the world as in any way separable from its audible aspect, or from the
myriad textures that offer themselves to my touch. When the local
tomcat comes to visit, I do not have distinctive experiences of a vis-
ible cat, an audible cat, and an olfactory cat; rather, the tomcat is pre-
cisely the place where these separate sensory modalities join and
dissolve into one another, blending as well with a certain furry
tactility. Thus, my divergent senses meet up with each other in the
surrounding world, converging and commingling in the things I
perceive. We may think of the sensing body as a kind of open circuit
that completes itself only in things, and in the world. The differen- *
tiation of my senses, as well as their spontaneous convergence in the
world at large, ensures that I am a being destined for relationship: it
is primarily through my engagement with what is not me that I effect
the integration of my senses, and thereby experience my own unity
and coherence.*”

Indeed, the synaesthetic flowing together of different senses into
a dynamic and unified experience is already operative within the sin-
gle system of vision itself. For ordinary vision is a blending of two
unique vistas, two perspectives, two eyes. Even here, within a single
sensory system, we discern an originary openness or divergence—

126 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

between, in this case, the two sides of my body, each with its own ac-
cess to the visible—and it is only via the convergence and meeting
of these two perspectives at some point out in front of my body
that the visible world becomes present to me in all its depth. The
double images common to unfocused vision have only a flimsy real-
ity: if I let my eyes focus upon a shelf across the room, and mean-
while hold my index finger up in front of my face, I find that two
images of my finger float before me like insubstantial phantoms and
that the shelf, despite its greater distance, is much more substantial
and present to my awareness than is my finger. Only when I break
my focus upon the shelf and let my eyes reunite at the finger does
this appendage with its delicate hairs and gnarly knuckles become
fully present.

Ordinary seeing, then, involves the convergence of two views into
a single dynamic vision; divergent parts of myself are drawn to-
gether by the object, and I thus meet up with myself over there, at
that tree or that spider upon which I focus. Vision itself, in other
words, is already a kind of synaesthesia, a collaboration of different
sensory channels or organs. *8

When we attend carefully to our perceptual experience, we dis-
cover that the convergence of the eyes often prompts the added col-
laboration of the other senses. When, for instance, I gaze through
the window toward a blackbird in a nearby bush—my two eyes
drawn together by the bird’s jerking body as it plucks red berries
from the branches—other senses are quite naturally drawn into that
same focus. Certain tactile sensations, for instance, may accompany
the blackbird’s movements, and if I have been watching carefully I
may notice, as it squoonches each new berry in its beak, a slightly
acidic taste burst within my mouth. Or rather, strangely, I seem to
feel this burst of taste over there, in zts mouth, yet I feel its mouth
only with my own.

Similarly, when I watch a stranger learning to ride a bicycle for
the first time, my own body, although it is standing solidly on the
ground, inadvertently experiences the uncertain equilibrum of the
rider, and when that bicycle teeters and falls I feel the harsh impact
of the asphalt against my own leg and shoulder. My tactile and pro-
prioceptive senses are, it would seem, caught up over there where my
eyes have been focused; the momentary shock and subsequent

Animism and the Alphabet 127

throbbing in my limbs make me wince. My hearing, as well, had
been focused by the crash; the other ambient sounds to which I’d
been listening just before (birds, children playing) have no existence
for me now, only this stranger’s pained breathing as he slowly shoves
the bicycle aside and accepts the hand I am offering, pulling himself
to his feet. He shakes his head, laughs a bit, then grins—all in a man-
ner that readily communicates to my body that he’s okay—and then
turns to inspect the bicycle.

The diversity of my sensory systems, and their spontaneous con-
vergence in the things that I encounter, ensures this interpenetration
or interweaving between my body and other bodies—this magical
participation that permits me, at times, to feel what others feel. The
gestures of another being, the rhythm of its voice, and the stiffness
or bounce in its spine all gradually draw my senses into a unique re-
lation with one another, into a coherent, if shifting, organization.
And the more I linger with this other entity, the more coherent the
relation becomes, and hence the more completely I find myself face-
to-face with another intelligence, another center of experience.

In the encounter with the cyclist, as in my experience of the
blackbird, the visual focus induced and made possible the participa-
tion of the other senses. In different situations, other senses may ini-
tiate the synaesthesia: our ears, when we are at an orchestral concert;
or our nostrils, when a faint whiff of burning leaves suddenly brings
images of childhood autumns; our skin, when we are touching or
being touched by a lover. Nonetheless, the dynamic conjunction of
the eyes has a particularly ubiquitous magic, opening a quivering
depth in whatever we focus upon, ceaselessly inviting the other
senses into a concentrated exchange with stones, squirrels, parked
cars, persons, snow-capped peaks, clouds, and termite-ridden logs.
This power—the synaesthetic magnetism of the visual focus—will
prove crucial for our understanding of literacy and its perceptual ef-
fects,

The most important chapter of Merleau-Ponty’s last, unfinished
work is entitled “The Intertwining—The Chiasm.” The word “chi-
asm,” derived from an ancient Greek term meaning “crisscross,” is
in common use today only in the field of neurobiology: the “optic
chiasm” is that anatomical region, between the right and left hemi-
spheres of the brain, where neuronal fibers from the right eye and

128 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

the left eye cross and interweave. As there is a chiasm between the
two eyes, whose different perspectives continually conjoin into a sin-
gle vision, so—according to Merleau-Ponty—there is a chiasm be-
tween the various sense modalities, such that they continually couple
and collaborate with one another. Finally, this interplay of the dif-
ferent senses is what enables the chiasm between the body and the
earth, the reciprocal participation—between one’s own flesh and the
encompassing flesh of the world—that we commonly call percep-
tion.*?

Phonetic reading, of course, makes use of a particular sensory
conjunction—that between seeing and hearing. And indeed, among
the various synaesthesias that are common to the human body, the
confluence (or chiasm) between seeing and hearing is particularly
acute. For vision and hearing are the two “distance” senses of the
human organism. In contrast to touch and proprioception (inner-
body sensations), and unlike the chemical senses of taste and smell,
seeing and hearing regularly place us in contact with things and
events unfolding at a substantial distance from our own visible, au-
dible body.

My visual gaze explores the reflective surfaces of things, their
outward color and contour. By following the play of light and
shadow, the dance of colors, and the gradients of repetitive patterns,
the eyes—themselves gleaming surfaces—keep me in contact with
the multiple outward facets, or faces, of the things arrayed about me.
The ears, meanwhile, are more inward organs; they emerge from the
depths of my skull like blossoms or funnels, and their participation
tells me less about the outer surface than the interior substance of
things. For the audible resonance of beings varies with their mater-
ial makeup, as the vocal calls of different animals vary with the size
and shape of their interior cavities and hollows. I feel their expres-
sive cries resound in my skull or my chest, echoing their sonorous
qualities with my own materiality, and thus learn of their inward dif-
ference from myself. Looking and listening bring me into contact,
respectively, with the outward surfaces and with the interior volumi-
nosity of things, and hence where these senses come together, I ex-
perience, over there, the complex interplay of inside and outside
that is characteristic of my own self-experience. It is thus at those
junctures in the surrounding landscape where my eves and my ears

Animism and the Alphabet 129

are drawn together that I most readily feel myself confronted by an-
other power like myself, another life.

If a native hunter is tracking, alone, in the forest, and a whooping
cry reaches his ears from the leafy canopy, he will likely halt in his
steps, silencing his breathing in order to hear that sound, when it
comes again, more precisely. His eyes scan the cacophony of
branches overhead with an unfocused gaze, attentive to minute
movements on the periphery of the perceptual field. A slight rustle
of branches draws his eyes into a more precise focus, his attention
now restricted to a small patch of the canopy, yet still open, ques-
tioning, listening. When the cry comes again, the eyes, led by the
ears, swiftly converge upon the source of that sound, and suddenly a
monkey’s form becomes evident, half-hidden from the leaves, its tail
twirled around a limb, its body poised, watching. As the tribesman’s
searching eyes are drawn into a common focus with his listening
ears, this conjunction, this chiasm, rebounds upon his own tactile
and proprioceptive sensations—he feels himself suddenly con-
fronted, caught up in a dynamic exchange with another entity, an-
other carnal intelligence.

Indeed, the synaesthesia between the human eyes and ears is es-
pecially: concentrated in our relation to other animals, since for a
million years these “distance” senses were most tightly coupled at
such moments of extreme excitement, when closing in on prey, or
when escaping from predators. When backing slowly away from a
mother grizzly protecting her cubs, or when watching intently the
movements of an aroused rattlenake in order to avoid its numbing
strike—these are moments when visual and auditory foci are virtu-
ally indistinguishable. For these senses are functioning here as a sin-
gle, hyperattentive organ; we feel ourselves listening with our eyes
and watching with our ears, ready to respond with our whole body to
any change in the Other’s behavior.

Yet our ears and our eyes are drawn together not only by animals,
but by numerous other phenomena within the landscape. And,
strangely, wherever these two senses converge, we may suddenly feel
ourselves in relation with another expressive power, another center
of experience. Trees, for instance, can seem to speak to us when they
are jostled by the wind. Different forms of foliage lend each tree a
distinctive voice, and a person who has lived among them will easily

130 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

distinguish the various dialects of pine trees from the speech of
spruce needles or Douglas fir. Anyone who has walked through
cornfields knows the uncanny experience of being scrutinized and
spoken to by whispering stalks. Certain rock faces and boulders re-
quest from us a kind of auditory attentiveness, and so draw our ears
into relation with our eyes as we gaze at them, or with our hands as
we touch them—for it is only through a mode of listening that we
can begin to sense the interior voluminosity of the boulder, its par-
ticular density and depth. There is an expectancy to the ears, a kind
of patient receptivity that they lend to the other senses whenever we
place ourselves in a mode of listening—whether to a stone, or a river,
or an abandoned house. That so many indigenous people allude to
the articulate speech of trees or of mountains suggests the ease with
which, in an oral culture, one’s auditory attention may be joined
with the visual focus in order to enter into a living relation with the
expressive character of things.

Far from presenting a distortion of their factual relation to the
world, the animistic discourse of indigenous, oral peoples is an in-
evitable counterpart of their immediate, synaesthetic engagement
with the land that they inhabit. The animistic proclivity to perceive
the angular shape of a boulder (while shadows shift across its sur-
face) as a kind of meaningful gesture, or to enter into felt conversa-
tions with clouds and owls—all of this could be brushed aside as
imaginary distortion or hallucinatory fantasy if such active partici-
pation were not the very structure of perception, if the creative in-
terplay of the senses in the things they encounter was not our sole
way of linking ourselves to those things and letting the things weave
themselves into our experience. Direct, prereflective perception is
inherently synaesthetic, participatory, and animistic, disclosing the
things and elements that surround us not as inert objects but as ex-
pressive subjects, entities, powers, potencies.

And yet most of us seem, today, very far from such experience.
Trees rarely, if ever, speak to us; animals no longer approach us as
emissaries from alien zones of intelligence; the sun and the moon no
longer draw prayers from us but seem to arc blindly across the sky.
How is it that these phenomena no longer address us, no longer com-
pel our involvement or reciprocate our attention? If participation
is the very structure of perception, how could it ever have been

Animism and the Alphabet 131

brought to a halt? To freeze the ongoing animation, to block the
wild exchange between the senses and the things that engage them,
would be tantamount to freezing the body itself, stopping it short in
its tracks. And yet our bodies still move, still live, still breathe. If
we no longer experience the enveloping earth as expressive and
alive, this can only mean that the animating interplay of the senses
has been transferred to another medium, another locus of participa-
tion.

IT IS THE WRITTEN TEXT THAT PROVIDES THIS NEW LOCUS. FOR TO
read is to enter into a profound participation, or chiasm, with the
inked marks upon the page. In learning to read we must break the
spontaneous participation of our eyes and our ears in the surround-
ing terrain (where they had ceaselessly converged in the synaesthetic
encounter with animals, plants, and streams) in order to recouple
those senses upon the flat surface of the page. As a Zufii elder fo-
cuses her eyes upon a cactus and hears the cactus begin to speak, so
we focus our eyes upon these printed marks and immediately hear
voices. We hear spoken words, witness strange scenes or visions,
even experience other lives. As nonhuman animals, plants, and even
“inanimate” rivers once spoke to our tribal ancestors, so the “inert”
letters on the page now speak to us! This is a form of animism that we
take for granted, but it 1s animism nonetheless—as mysterious as a talk-
ing stone.

And indeed, it is only when a culture shifts its participation to
these printed letters that the stones fall silent. Only as our senses
transfer their animating magic to the written word do the trees be-
come mute, the other animals dumb.

But let us be more precise, recalling the distinction between dif-
ferent forms of writing discussed at the start of this chapter. As we
saw there, pictographic, ideographic, and even rebuslike writing still
makes use of, or depends upon, our sensorial participation with the
natural world. As the tracks of moose and bear refer beyond them-
selves to those entities of whom they are the trace, so the images in
early writing systems draw their significance not just from ourselves
but from sun, moon, vulture, jaguar, serpent, lightning—from all
those sensorial, never strictly human powers, of which the written

132 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

images were a kind of track or tracing. To be sure, these signs were
now inscribed by human hands, not by the hooves of deer or the
clawed paws of bear; yet as long as they presented images of paw

prints (¥ and of clouds fm, of sun ate and of serpent \\W\A,

these characters still held us in relation to a more-than-human
field of discourse. Only when the written characters lost all explicit
reference to visible, natural phenomena did we move into a new
order of participation. Only when those images came to be associ-
ated, alphabetically, with purely human-made sounds, and even
the names of the letters lost all worldly, extrahuman significance,
could speech or language come to be experienced as an exclusively
human power. For only then did civilization enter into the wholly
self-reflexive mode of animism, or magic, that still holds us in its
spell:

We know what the animals do, what are the needs of the beaver,
the bear, the salmon, and other creatures, because long ago men
married them and acquired this knowledge from their animal
wives. Today the priests say we lie, but we know better. The
white man has been only a short time in this country and knows
very little about the animals; we have lived here thousands of
years and were taught long ago by the animals themselves. The
white man writes everything down in a book so that it will not be
forgotten; but our ancestors married animals, learned all their
ways, and passed on this knowledge from one generation to an-
other.

THAT ALPHABETIC READING AND WRITING WAS ITSELF EXPERI-
enced as a form of magic is evident from the reactions of cultures
suddenly coming into contact with phonetic writing. Anthropologi-
cal accounts from entirely different continents report that members
of indigenous, oral tribes, after seeing the European reading from a
book or from his own notes, came to speak of the written pages as
“talking leaves,” for the black marks on the flat, leaflike pages
seemed to talk directly to the one who knew their secret.

The Hebrew scribes never lost this sense of the letters as living,

Animism and the Alphabet 133

animate powers. Much of the Kabbalah, the esoteric body of Jewish
mysticism, is centered around the conviction that each of the
twenty-two letters of the Hebrew aleph-beth is a magic gateway or
guide into an entire sphere of existence. Indeed, according to some
kabbalistic accounts, it was by combining the letters that the Holy
One, Blessed Be He, created the ongoing universe. The Jewish kab-
balists found that the letters, when meditated upon, would continu-
ally reveal new secrets; through the process of tzeruf, the magical
permutation of the letters, the Jewish scribe could bring himself
into sucessively greater states of ecstatic union with the divine.
Here, in other words, was an intensely concentrated form of ani-
mism—a participation conducted no longer with the sculpted idols
and images worshiped by other tribes but solely with the visible let-
ters of the aleph-beth.

Perhaps the most succinct evidence for the potent magic of writ-
ten letters is to be found in the ambiguous meaning of our common
English word “spell.” As the roman alphabet spread through oral
Europe, the Old English word “spell,” which had meant simply to
recite a story or tale, took on the new double meaning: on the one
hand, it now meant to arrange, in the proper order, the written let-
ters that constitute the name of a thing or a person; on the other,
it signified a magic formula or charm. Yet these two meanings were
not nearly as distinct as they have come to seem to us today. For
to assemble the letters that make up the name of a thing, in the cor-
rect order, was precisely to effect a magic, to establish a new kind
of influence over that entity, to summon it forth! To spell, to cor-
rectly arrange the letters to form a name or a phrase, seemed thus at
the same time to cast a spell, to exert a new and lasting power over
the things spelled. Yet we can now realize that to learn to spell was
also, and more profoundly, to step under the influence of the written
letters ourselves, to cast a spell upon our own senses. It was to ex-
change the wild and multiplicitous magic of an intelligent natural
world for the more concentrated and refined magic of the written
word.

THE BULGARIAN SCHOLAR TZVETAN TODOROV HAS WRITTEN AN
illuminating study of the Spanish conquest of the Americas, based

134 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

on extensive study of documents from the first months and years of
contact between European culture and the native cultures of the
American continent.®! The lightning-swift conquest of Mexico by
Cortéz has remained a puzzle for historians, since Cortéz, leading
only a few hundred men, managed to seize the entire kingdom of
Montezuma, who commanded several hundred thousand. Todorov
concludes that Cortéz’s astonishing and rapid success was largely a
result of the discrepancy between the different forms of participa-
tion engaged in by the two societies. The Aztecs, whose writing was
highly pictorial, necessarily felt themselves in direct communication
with an animate, more-than-human environment. “Everything hap-
pens as if, for the Aztecs, [written] signs automatically and necessar-
ily proceed from the world they designate...”; the Aztecs are
unable to use their spoken words, or their written characters, to hide
their true intentions, since these signs belong to the world around
them as much as to themselves.” To be duplicitous with signs would
be, for the Aztecs, to go against the order of nature, against the en-
compassing speech or logos of an animate world, in which their own
tribal discourse was embedded.

The Spaniards, however, suffer no such limitation. Possessed of
an alphabetic writing system, they experience themselves not in
communication with the sensuous forms of the world, but solely
with one another. The Aztecs must answer, in their actions as in their
speech, to the whole sensuous, natural world that surrounds them;
the Spanish need answer only to themselves.

In contact with this potent new magic, with these men who par-
ticipate solely with their own self-generated signs, whose speech
thus seems to float free of the surrounding landscape, and who could
therefore be duplicitous and Jie even in the presence of the sun, the
moon, and the forest, the Indians felt their own rapport with those
sensuous powers, or gods, beginning to falter:

The testimony of the Indian accounts, which is a description
rather than an explanation, asserts that everything happened be-
cause the Mayas and the Aztecs lost control of communication.
The language of the gods has become unintelligible, or else these
gods fell silent. “Understanding is lost, wisdom is lost” [from the
Mayan account of the Spanish invasion].... As for the Aztecs,

Animism and the Alphabet 135

they describe the beginning of their own end as a silence that
falls: the gods no longer speak to them.

In the face of aggression from this new, entirely self-reflexive
form of magic, the native peoples of the Americas—like those of
Africa and, later, of Australia—felt their own magics wither and be-
come useless, unable to protect them.

In the Landscape

of Language

Tired of all who come with words, words but no language

I went to the snow-covered island.

The wild does not have words.

The unwritten pages spread themselves out in all directions!
I come across the marks of roe-deer’s hooves in the snow.
Language, but no words.

TOMAS TRANSTROMER

HE FIRST PART OF THIS BOOK RAISED THIS QUESTION: HOW

did Western civilization become so estranged from nonhu-

man nature, so oblivious to the presence of other animals

and the earth, that our current lifestyles and activities contribute

daily to the destruction of whole ecosystems—whole forests, river

valleys, oceans—and to the extinction of countless species? Or, more

specifically, how did civilized humankind lose all sense of reciproc-

ity and relationship with the animate natural world, that rapport that

so influences (and limits) the activities of most indigenous, tribal

peoples? How did civilization break out of, and leave behind, the an-

imistic or participatory mode of experience known to all native,
place-based cultures?

In the last chapter, however, we showed that animism was never,

137

138 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

in truth, left behind. The participatory proclivity of the senses was
simply transferred from the depths of the surrounding life-world to
the visible letters of the alphabet. Only by concentrating the synaes-
thetic magic of the senses upon the written letters could these letters
says Socrates,

)

begin to come alive and to speak. “Written words,’
“seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent... .”! Indeed,
today it is virtually impossible for us to look at a printed word with-
out seeing, or rather hearing, what “it says.” For our senses are now
coupled, synaesthetically, to these printed shapes as profoundly as
they were once wedded to cedar trees, ravens, and the moon. As the
hills and the bending grasses once spoke to our tribal ancestors, so
these written letters and words now speak to us.

We have seen as well that iconic writing systems—those that em-
ploy pictographic, ideographic, and/or rebuslike characters—neces-
sarily rely, to some extent, upon our original sensory participation
with the enveloping natural field. Only with the emergence of the
phonetic alphabet, and its appropriation by the ancient Greeks, did
the written images lose all evident ties to the larger field of expres-
sive beings. Each image now came to have a strictly human referent:
each letter was now associated purely with a gesture or sound of the
human mouth. Such images could no longer function as windows
opening on to a more-than-human field of powers, but solely as mir-
rors reflecting the human form back upon itself. The senses that en-
gaged or participated with this new writing found themselves locked
within a discourse that had become exclusively human. Only thus,
with the advent and spread of phonetic writing, did the rest of na-
ture begin to lose its voice.

The highly anthropocentric (human-centered) mode of experi-
ence endemic to alphabetic culture spread throughout Europe in the
course of two millennia, receiving a great boost from the calligraphic
innovations introduced in the monastic scriptoria (the rooms where
monks copied manuscripts) by the English monk Alcuin (732-804)
during the reign of Charlemagne, and a major thrust from the in-
vention of movable type by Johann Gutenberg (c. 1394 -1468), in
the fifteenth century. The printing press, and the dissemination of
uniformly printed texts that it made possible, ushered in the En-
lightenment and the profoundly detached view of “nature” that was
to prevail in the modern period.’ In recent centuries the industrial

In the Landscape of Language 139

and technological practices made possible by this new distance from
the natural world have carried alphabetic awareness throughout the
globe, infiltrating even those cultures that had retained iconic, ideo-
graphic writing systems.

Nevertheless, there remain, on the edges and even in the midst of
this ever-expanding monoculture, small-scale local cultures or com-
munities where the traditional oral, indigenous modes of experience
still prevail—cultures that have never fully transferred their sensory
participation to the written word. They have not yet closed them-
selves within an exclusively human field of meanings, and so still
dwell within a landscape that is alive, aware, and expressive. To such
peoples, that which we term “language” remains as much a property
of the animate landscape as of the humans who dwell and speak
within that terrain. Indeed, the linguistic discourse of such cultures
is commonly bound, in specific and palpable ways, to the expressive
earth.

In this chapter, then, we will glance at just a few of the very di-
verse ways in which the common discourse of an oral culture may
open, directly, onto the evocative sounds, shapes, and gestures of the
surrounding ecology.

The Language of the Birds

Whenever we of literate culture seek to engage and understand the
discourse of oral cultures, we must strive to free ourselves from our
habitual impulse to visualize any language as a static structure that
could be diagrammed, or a set of rules that could be ordered and
listed. Without a formal writing system, the language of an oral cul-
ture cannot be objectified as a separable entity by those who speak it,
and this lack of objectification influences not only the way in which
oral cultures experience the field of discursive meanings, but also
the very character and structure of that field. In the absence of any
written analogue to speech, the sensible, natural environment re-
mains the primary visual counterpart of spoken utterance, the visi-

140 ‘THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

ble accompaniment of all spoken meaning. The land, in other words,
is the sensible site or matrix wherein meaning occurs and prolifer-
ates. In the absence of writing, we find ourselves situated in the field
of discourse as we are embedded in the natural landscape; indeed,
the two matrices are not separable. We can no more stabilize the lan-
guage and render its meanings determinate than we can freeze all
motion and metamorphosis within the land.

5 A

IF WE LISTEN, FIRST, TO THE SOUNDS OF AN ORAL LANGUAGE—TO
the rhythms, tones, and inflections that play through the speech of
an oral culture—we will likely find that these elements are attuned,
in multiple and subtle ways, to the contour and scale of the local
landscape, to the depth of its valleys or the open stretch of its dis-
tances, to the visual rhythms of the local topography. But the human
speaking is necessarily tuned, as well, to the various nonhuman calls
and cries that animate the local terrain. Such attunement is simply
imperative for any culture still dependent upon foraging for its sub-
sistence. Minute alterations in the weather, changes in the migratory
patterns of prey animals, a subtle shift in the focus of a predator—
sensitivity to such subtleties is a necessary element of all oral, sub-
sistence cultures, and this sensitivity is inevitably reflected not just
in the content but in the very shapes and patterns of human dis-
course.?

Hunting, for an indigenous, oral community, entails abilities and
sensitivities very different from those associated with hunting in
technological civilization. Without guns or gunpowder, a native
hunter must often come much closer to his wild prey if he is to take
its life. Closer, that is, not just physically but emotionally, empathi-
cally entering into proximity with the other animal’s ways of sensing
and experiencing. The native hunter, in effect, must apprentice him-
self to those animals that he would kill. Through long and careful
observation, enhanced at times by ritual identification and mimesis,
the hunter gradually develops an instinctive knowledge of the habits
of his prey, of its fears and its pleasures, its preferred foods and fa-
vored haunts. Nothing is more integral to this practice than learning
the communicative signs, gestures, and cries of the local animals.
Knowledge of the sounds by which a monkey indicates to the others

In the Landscape of Language 141

in its band that it has located a good source of food, or the cries by
which a particular bird signals distress, or by which another attracts
a mate, enables the hunter to anticipate both the large-scale and
small-scale movements of various animals. A familiarity with animal
calls and cries provides the hunter, as well, with an expanded set of
senses, an awareness of events happening beyond his field of vision,
hidden by the forest leaves or obscured by the dark of night. More-
over, the skilled human hunter often can generate and mimic such
sounds himself, and it is this that enables him to enter most directly
into the society of other animals.

One of the most revealing twentieth-century accounts of a rela-
tively intact indigenous community is that recorded by F. Bruce
Lamb from the spoken recollections of the Peruvian doctor Manuel
Cérdova-Rios.* Cérdova-Rios was captured in 1907, when he was
fifteen years old, by a small tribe of Amahuaca Indians living deep
in the Amazonian rain forest (between the headwaters of the Jurua,
Purtis, Madre de Dios, and Inuya rivers)—probably the remnant of
a larger tribe decimated by the incursion of the rubber-tapping in-
dustry into the forest. He was carefully trained by the headman of
this small tribe to become his successor, and was for six years metic-
ulously tutored in the ways of the hunt, in the medicinal and magical
powers of the rain forest plants, and in the traditional prepara-
tion and use of extracts from the ayahuasca vine to attain, when nec-
essary, a clairvoyant state of fusion with the enveloping jungle
ecosystem.

Curiously, the tribe’s language, which remained largely meaning-
less to Cérdova-Rios for six months or more, became understand-
able to his ears only as his senses became attuned to the subtleties of
the rain forest ecology in which the culture was embedded. He did,
eventually, become headman of the tribe, yet he fled the rain forest
the following year after a series of attempts on his life by a neigh-
boring band.

Cérdova-Rios’s descriptions of the various hunts in which he
participated make vividly evident the extent to which these people’s
senses were directly coupled to the enveloping forest:

They reacted to the faintest signals of sound and smell, intu-
itively relating them to all other conditions of the environment

142 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

and then interpreting them to achieve the greatest possible cap-
ture of game. ... Many of the best hunters seemed to know by
some special extra sense just where to find the game they sought,
or they had developed some special method of drawing game to
them. Knowing how to imitate and to use the signals the animals
made to communicate between their kind in various situations
helped in locating game and drawing it within sighting range of
an astute hunter.

In the course of Cérdova-Rios’s account, we read careful descrip-
tions of hunters sequestered in the foliage of high fruit trees luring
partridges toward them with mimicked bird calls signaling the dis-
covery of an abundant food source. We read of one hunter who,
upon hearing a band of monkeys moving through the dense forest
canopy overhead, utters a cry that would be made by a baby monkey
if it had fallen to the ground. This call stops the roving monkeys and
brings them down beneath the thick foliage into the hunter’s arrow
range; the hunter shoots two of them to feed his family.® Later
Cordova-Rios’s native comrades teach him, through imitation, the
principal vocal signals of a species of wild pig that they are hunting.

Through ancestral stories and tales of recent hunts, the hunters
continually exchange knowledge among themselves regarding the
nuanced meanings of particular calls made by various creatures, a
knowledge gleaned from ever-renewed encounters with those ani-
mals in the wild. In many instances knowledge of the specific alarm
cries of birds and other animals alert the human hunters to the pres-
ence of dangerous predators, like the jaguar, that they themselves
must avoid.

A typical example of such interspecies linguistic savvy is an en-
counter reported by a man named Raci to the other members of a
hunting expedition, including Cérdova-Rios, as the various hunters
lie in their hammocks at night, recounting for each other, in detail,
their individual efforts of the day:

It was time to start back and I had no game. Just as I turned to
come back toward camp a small ground-sleeping tinamou [a type
of jungle partridge] sent out his sad call, close to where I was, and
he was answered by another. You know why their evening call is

In the Landscape of Language 143

so sad? They don’t like to sleep alone and at sunset each one wan-
ders around aimlessly calling and calling until an answer comes
back from somewhere, and then the two move closer and closer
together, guided by the calls. And so they find a sleeping partner.
I answered the call and found I was between the two birds. So I
backed up between the buttresses of a big tree where the ground
could be seen for a good distance in front of me, and I started
calling the birds to me. You know that it is dangerous to call the
tinamou without the protection of a big tree. The jaguar some-
times comes in answer to the call! The tinamou is also his fa-
vorite bird.

One bird was nearby and soon had my arrow in his body. He
fluttered his wings and kicked a few turns, but was soon with me
at the base of the tree. I broke his leg and put a long streak of his
blood under each of my eyes to bring good luck.’

Every collective hunting expedition is preceded by careful ritual
preparations, during which the hunters eat only certain foods, eras-
ing their human odors by soaking themselves in various herbal baths
and immersing themselves in the smoke of burning leaves. The ex-
peditions themselves are accompanied by reverent chants to particu-
lar forest spirits. The various practices of the tribe, according to
Cordova-Rios, embody clear knowledge of the limits beyond which
a species of animal must not be hunted; overhunting of a single type
of animal or bird is known to bring poor luck upon the hunter or
even upon the whole village. Cordova-Rios, for instance, is taught
that if he kills the leader of a band of wild pigs (which leaves the pigs
disorganized and all too easy to prey upon until a new leader takes
over), he must never again kill a leader of the same band.

Meanwhile Xumu, the tribal headman, oversaw the hunting en-
gagements of the group as a whole. Each of the men was assigned by
him to an individual hunting territory, and they all reported daily to
Xumu regarding the shifting locations of the various bands of mon-
keys and wild pigs, of the jaguar and other forest inhabitants. Kept
apprised in this manner of systemic events unfolding throughout
the forest (to a distance of several days journey in all directions from
the village) the headman was able by his instructions to appropri-
ately modulate the hunting activities of the small tribe, continually

144 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

modifying these activities in response to the living gestures of the
forest itself.

Cordova-Rios’s narrative provides vivid evidence of the extent to
which, in the Amazon rain forest, human and nonhuman life-worlds
interpenetrate and inform one another. Analogous forms of interac-
tion may be found in every hunting and foraging culture. For sub-
sistence hunting, once again, entails that the human tribesman enter
into a profound sensorial rapport with other animals. And this par-
ticipation, as Cordova-Rios makes evident, necessarily extends into
the vocal dimension, wherein animal cries and communicative calls
are pondered, mimicked, and replied to by human hunters, becom-
ing as it were part of the tribal vocabulary. Tribespeople traveling
through the forest at some distance from one another, for example,
often use mimicked animal cries and bird calls to communicate
among themselves, as a means of calling out to each other without
drawing the attention of certain animals, or of rival human bands
that might be lingering in the area. It would be startling if these con-
stantly employed calls, cries, hoots, riffs, and whistles had no influ-
ence on the everyday speech of the tribe as a whole. On the contrary,
in the absence of any formal writing system that might stabilize the
local language and render it impervious to the shifting sounds of the
animate landscape, the spoken discourse of oral, foraging peoples
remains uniquely responsive to the multiple sounds and rhythms of
the nonhuman surroundings, and especially attuned to the vocal ges-
tures and cries of the local animals.

We have learned from Saussure that a human language is struc-
tured not so muchas a collection of terms, each of which possesses a
determinate meaning, but as a complexly ramified web, wherein the
knots, or terms, hold their specific place or meaning only by virtue of
their direct and indirect relations to all other terms within the lan-
guage. If such is indeed the case, then even Just a few terms or
phrases borrowed directly from the vocal speech sounds of other an-
imals would serve to subtly influence all the ratios of the language,
rooting the language, as it were, in a particular ecology, a particular
terrain. Once again, no indigenous, oral language can be genuinely
understood in separation from the more-than-human earth that sus-
tains it, of which the language itself is a kind of internal articulation.

Saussure himself, however, denied the possibility of such inti-

In the Landscape of Language 145

macy between language and the land; his resolute insistence upon
the arbitrariness of the relation between spoken sounds and that
which they signify led him to downplay the influence of mimicry,
onomatopoeia, and sound symbolism within the life of any lan-
guage. Nevertheless, more recent research on the echoic and gestural
significance of spoken sounds has demonstrated that a subtle sort of
onomatopoeia is constantly at work in language: certain meanings
inevitably gravitate toward certain sounds, and vice versa.’ (Every
poet is aware of this primordial depth in language, whereby particu-
lar sensations are invoked by the sounds themselves, and whereby
the shape, rhythm, and texture of particular phrases conjure the ex-
pressive character of particular phenomena.)

THE INTERTWINING @F HUMAN SPEECH WITH THE CALLS AND CRIES
of the local earth is evident even when we turn away from the trop-
ics toward an oral culture of the far north, like that of the Koyukon
Indians of northwestern Alaska. The Koyukon inhabit a vast ex-
panse of wild country extending well north of the Arctic Circle,
with camps and villages set along the Yukon and Koyukuk rivers.
Their language belongs to the Athapaskan family of languages
spoken by native peoples scattered throughout much of northwest-
ern North America and in pockets as far south as Arizona. The
ancestors of the Koyukon people may have inhabited Alaska as
early as ten thousand years ago,’ although archaeologists have been
unable to date the Athapaskan emergence into North America
with any precision. The Koyukon, first encountered by Europeans
in the mid-nineteenth century, have in the twentieth century slowly
abandoned their traditional pattern of scattered seminomadism,
moving into a few settlements built near trading posts or Catholic
missions. Yet they still travel widely, using their villages more as
home bases from which to journey on foraging expeditions for fish,
land animals (for clothing as well as food), berries, and other wild
provisions.

According to anthropologist and ethnobiologist Richard Nelson,
who has lived and worked closely with the Koyukon people, language
to them is as much the province of other animals as it is the domain
of humankind. The Koyukon assume that nonhuman animals

146 ‘THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

communicate among themselves, and [that] they understand
human behavior and language. They are constantly aware of
what people say and do... . But animals do not use human lan-
guage among themselves. They communicate with sounds which
are considered their own form of language.!°

In Koyukon belief, the other animals and the plants once shared
a common language with human beings. This was in the Distant
Time (Kk‘adontstdnee), a time during which all living beings
“shared one society and went through dreamlike transmutations
from animals or plants to humans, and sometimes back again.”!! We
will postpone until the next chapter the question of whether the sto-
ries told of the Distant Time by the Koyukon people depict an orig-
inary time “long ago” in the past—as they are often interpreted
according to the linear-historical view of time first imported into the
Koyukon territory by Catholic missionaries—or whether the Dis-
tant Time is more coherently understood as a unique dimension or
modality of time, one that is more integral to the living present than
it is to the historical past. In any case, and despite the apparent dif-
ferentiation of animal and human languages since, or outside of, the
Distant Time, the various discourses of humans and animals still
overlap and interpenetrate in the everyday experience of Koyukon
persons.

Caribou, for instance, are said to “sing through” human beings
when in their vicinity, granting the tribespeople songs that certain
persons remember upon waking from sleep. When those persons
sing these songs later, their success in finding and hunting caribou is
ensured.'? Tribal elders, meanwhile, listen closely to the rippling
cries and wails of the loon as a source of inspiration in composing
their own songs and chants. When a revered Koyukon elder lay near
death, Nelson watched an old woman visiting from another village
as she approached the near shore of a lake and began to sing
Koyukon “spring songs” to a pair of loons that had been lingering
there.

Shortly the loons swam toward her until they rested in the water
some fifty yards away, and there they answered her, filling the air
with eerie and wonderful voices. When I spoke with her later, she

In the Landscape of Language 147

said that loons will often answer spring songs this way. For sev-
eral days people talked of how beautiful the songs had been that
morning.!3

The lilting cries of the common loon are linguistically meaningful
to the Koyukon. According to one man, “Sometimes people will
hunt the loon, but me, I don’t like to kill it. I like to listen to it all I
can and pick up the words it knows.”!* The speech of the rare yel-
low-billed loon is still more powerful than that of the common loon
to the Koyukon: “. . . it says the same words, but its voice is just a lit-
tle different.”!>
The assumption that nature is all aware, and that the sounds
made by animals are at least as meaningful as those made by hu-
mans, leads the Koyukon to listen attentively to subtle nuances and
variations in the calls of local birds. The Koyukon names for birds
are often highly onomatopoeic, so that in speaking their names one
is also echoing their cries. The Arctic tern (k idagaas’), the northern
phalarope (tiyee), the rusty blackbird (ts ‘uhutlts’eegga), the blackpoll
warbler (k’oot’anh), the slate-colored junco (k%t‘otlt’‘ahga)—all have
such names. Written transcription, however, cannot convey the re-
markable aptness of these names, which when spoken in Koyukon
have a lilting, often whistlelike quality. The interpenetration of
human and nonhuman utterances is particularly vivid in the case of
numerous bird songs that seem to enunciate whole phrases or state-
ments in Koyukon.

Many bird calls are interpreted as Koyukon words. . .. What is
striking about these words is how perfectly they mirror the call’s
pattern, so that someone [outside the tribe] who knows birdsongs
can readily identify the species when the words are spoken in
Koyukon. Not only the rhythm comes through, but also some of
the tone, the “feel” that goes with it.'®

As we ponder such correspondences, we come to realize that the
sounds and rhythms of the Koyukon language have been deeply
nourished by these nonhuman voices.

Hence the whirring, flutelike phrases of the hermit thrush, which
sound in the forest thickets at twilight, speak the Koyukon words

148 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

sook’eeyis deeyo—“it is a fine evening.” The thrushes also sometimes
speak the phrase nahutl-eeyh—literally, “a sign of the spirit is per-
ceived.” The thrush first uttered these words in the Distant Time,
when it sensed a ghost nearby, and even today the call may be heard
as a warning.!”

In fact, many of the phrases spoken by birds are understood by
reference to events that happened in the Distant Time, events that
contemporary Koyukon persons know of through the innumerable
Distant Time stories that are told and retold from one generation to
another.

Once, during the Distant Time, a starving man struggled in deep
spring snow, trying to reach a camp called “Ts’eetee Tlot.” He
was carrying a headband decorated with elongated, ivory-colored
dentalium shells that reached the north country through trade
from distant places on the coast. It was a hard spring. The man
became weaker and weaker, until finally he collapsed in the snow
and died. At that moment he was transformed into a white-
crowned sparrow, and then he flew on toward his destination.
When he reached the camp he sang: Dzo do’o stkits’eetee tlot.
“Here is Tse’eetee Tlot, but it is too late.” Anyone who listens to
a white-crowned sparrow today can still hear these melancholy
words. And anyone who looks closely will see the white stripes on
its head, remnants of the dentalium shell band he carried to his
death long ago.'®

Another bird commonly seen in the boreal forest is the Bohemian
waxwing as it hurries in small flocks from one tree to another, utter-
ing high, wispy trills. The Koyukon call the waxwing diltsooga—“he
squeaks.”

According to a Distant Time story, the waxwing had a very jeal-
ous wife who once dragged him around by the hair, giving him
the crest that now adorns his crown and making him cry out until
his voice became nothing but a squeak.!°

Meanwhile, the lesser yellowlegs, a shorebird, sometimes flies
straight up, then utters a piercing call as it descends: “Szyeets, szyeets,

In the Landscape of Language 149

styeets,” which means “My breath, my breath, my breath” in Koyu-
kon. Sometimes a person will shout back to it—“Siyeets/”—hoping
to receive from the bird some indication or omen of how long his or
her life (her span of breath) will be.

Many birds offer such vocal prophesies to the Koyukon. Once,
Nelson’s principal Koyukon instructor, along with her grandfather,
heard a grey jay speak in an uncommonly human voice:

Rain was falling, and the bird sat on a branch overhead, looking
soggy and disheveled. Suddenly it spoke in clear words, “My
brother ... my brother, what is going to happen?” The old man,
a shaman, was startled by the voice and worried by its message.
Afterward the rain poured down for nine days, flooding bears
from their dens and creating general havoc. And then people
knew what the bird had meant.”°

However, the preeminent prophet or seer among birds is the great
horned owl, which is called by the Koyukon mgood zagha (small ears)
or nodneeya (tells you things). The horned owl dwells in the north
country year-round, rarely seen but often heard, and is sometimes
hunted for food. According to the Koyukon, when the nodneeya
speaks to human persons, it utters only what is certain:

When it is about to speak prophetically, the bird first makes a
muffled squawking sound—then it hoots in tones and patterns
that can be interpreted. The most terrifying words it can say are
“Soon you will cry” (“Adakk‘ut daa’tohtsah”), meaning that
someone close to you will die. It may even seal the forecast tightly
with a name, and not long afterward its omen will be fulfilled?!

Once, some years ago, people heard a horned ow! clearly intone the
Koyukon words “Black bears will cry.” For the next two seasons, the
wild berry crops failed and many bears found it hard to survive.”
The owl’s augury is not always foreboding. Sometimes it seems to
call repeatedly in Koyukon, “You will eat the belly of something,”
foretelling good luck in one’s hunting. It can also predict imminent
storms. According to one Koyukon elder: “When the owl makes a
kind of grunting sound, like this, Mmmmm ...Mmmmm, it means

150 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

stormy weather is coming. Owl’s call, that’s the only weather report
we used to have!”?3

Meanwhile, the robins, when they sing their lilting phrases, are
experienced by the Koyukon as making a short speech: “Dodo Silinh
k‘oolkkoy ts’eega, tilzoot tilzoot silnee silnee”—“Down there, my
brother-in-law tells me to eat pike entrails.” Yet the tribespeople,
ever attentive to shifts in the surrounding environment, have noticed
that the robin’s song is itself shifting. One of them remarked to Nel-
son: “Even the birds are changing. The robins don’t say their song
plainly anymore—they only say it halfway, like a kid would when its
learning. ”*

Another conspicuous bird in the Koyukon bioregion is the fox
sparrow, whose loud and oft-heard call, “Sitsoo sideiy huldaghudla
gheeyits,” is a sorrowful lament, understood only by reference to a
vivid Distant Time story:

In the Distant Time there was a beautiful woman who lived with
her husband and grandmother. Once, when her husband was
away, the old woman pretended to search through her grand-
daughter’s hair for lice but instead she thrust a bone awl into her
ear and broke it off, killing her. Then she took her scalp and put
it on her own head, disguising herself as the wife. She also put a
bone needle into her navel and twisted it to tighten the loose,
flabby skin on her belly. Finally she put on the younger woman’s
clothes; and disguised this way she fooled the husband into think-
ing she was his wife.

But when she carried game from his canoe she could not move
nimbly, so she had to excuse herself by saying that work made her
feel stiff. After they went to bed, however, the husband recog-
nized who she was. He remained quiet until the next morning,
and then he killed the old woman and dragged her body into the
woods, where he also found his wife lying dead.

Then the young woman’s body became a little bird that flew
into the air, singing: sitsoo sidziy huldaghudla gheeyits, “Grand-
mother poked a bone awl in my ear.” Nowadays the fox sparrow
still sings this way. . . .7°

The telling of Distant Time stories is central to the Koyukon way
of life. Some of the story cycles are so long that their telling con-

In the Landscape of Language 151

sumes many evenings, even several weeks of evenings.?® By des-
cribing the emergence of the world into its evident form, and by
thus articulating the formal relations that exist between the various
entities in the enveloping cosmos (1 cluding humans and other land
animals, birds, fish, the various trees and plants, conspicuous land-
forms, bodies of water and weather patterns—all of whom, in that
time out of time, shared a common society and spoke a common
tongue), the Distant Time stories make explicit the proper etiquette
that must be maintained by the Koyukon people when dealing with
the diverse presences that surround them, the kinships that must be
celebrated and the taboos that must be respected if the human com-
munity and the land are to support and sustain one another.

Distant Time stories are told only during the late fall and the first
half of the long northern winter. Indeed, scholars of native lore have
found this to be an almost continentwide rule: throughout North
America, at least prior to 1900, native communities listened to their
most sacred stories only at night and only during the winter. For the
spoken stories themselves carry a magic, a power to influence not
only persons but the living land itself; in the dark winter night a
story well told may hasten the coming of spring. (Thus, a Koyukon
teller may conclude a story with a phrase such as “I thought that
winter had just begun, but now I have chewed off part of it.”)*? The
dark of winter, when some of the most powerful animals are hiber-
nating, when other animals have gone south and the land itself is
sleeping, is also the safest time to recount the stories; during the
summer, when most of the animals are out and about, the animals
and other natural powers may get upset at hearing themselves and
their Distant Time exploits referred to so directly.?8

For since the other animals themselves speak, they can also hear and
understand our own talking. We must be careful what we say about
animals, especially when they are nearby. The Koyukon people
take great care to avoid speaking of certain animals directly, using
elaborate circumlocutions so as not to offend them. It is for this
reason that at night the red squirrel is never spoken of by its ordi-
nary names, but is referred to by the indirect appellation dzkink
k‘alyee—‘“the one that is on the side of a tree.”*? Women, because
they have an excess of spiritual power, must avoid calling the otter
by its real name, lest they frighten it, and so refer to the animal only

152 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

indirectly as biziya—‘“shiny black.”3° The lynx, another profoundly
potent animal to the Koyukon, is called by the women nodooya, a
vague circumlocution that means “something going around.”?! To
speak carelessly or to disregard such taboos, which hold for many of
the forest animals, would invite bad luck for oneself and one’s
family.

Such roundabout ways of speaking are particularly important
during the hunt, when the slightest disrespect for the hunted animal
may ensure failure, not just in the present but in future hunts as well.
“Hunting black bears in their dens required many gestures of re-
spect, beginning with the etiquette of speech.”** Preparing for such
an encounter, the hunter cannot speak of his intentions directly, and
afterward, even if successful, he must not tell what he has done.
Later, in the evening perhaps, he might obliquely tell someone, “I
found something ina hole.” To speak any more directly would of-
fend the powerful being that he has killed.*?

As the anthropologist Richard Nelson spends more time with
the Koyukon, the efficacy of such spoken etiquette begins to influ-
ence even his own solitary experience. At home on the Alaskan
coast, preparing for a trip back to Koyukon country, he decides to
catch a halibut to bring his native friends. Never even considering
that he might not be successful, he mentions to a friend that he will
take the whole fish to their village so that they can see what it looks
like. But

{a]s the words came out, I knew Koyukon people would never
talk as if catching a fish was a foregone conclusion. That day I
spent hours in places where I’d done well all summer, and caught
nothing except one quillback and a lingcod so small I didn’t have
the heart to keep it. When I arrived at the [Koyukon] village and
told Sarah Stevens, she shook her head like a mother gently
scolding her child. “The most you should say is that you’ll try to
catch a fish, or better yet, don’t say anything at all. Otherwise it
sounds like you’re bragging, and the animals always stay away
from people who talk like that.”*4

Of course, it is not only when speaking of other animals that one
must be mindful, but also when alluding to the forest trees, to the

In the Landscape of Language 153

rivers, even to the winds and the weather. Nelson, stung by the win-
ter cold, reminds himself of the Koyukon elders’ advice “about ac-
cepting the weather as it comes and avoiding remarks that might
offend it. This is especially true of cold, which has great power and
is easily provoked to numbing fits of temper.”

All things can hearand understand our speaking, for all things are
capable of speech. Even the crackling sounds made by the new ice on
the lakes are a kind of earthly utterance, laden with meaning:

In falltime you’ll hear the lakes make loud, cracking noises after
they freeze. It means they’re asking for snow to cover them up, to
protect them from the cold. . . .*°

Such deference in the face of natural elements—the clear sense
that the animate terrain is not just speaking to us but also listening to
us—bears out Merleau-Ponty’s thesis of perceptual reciprocity; to
listen to the forest is also, primordially, to feel oneself listened to by
the forest, just as to gaze at the surrounding forest is to feel oneself
exposed and visible, to feel oneself watched by the forest.

Much as humans communicate not only with audible utterances
but with visible movements and gestures, so the land also speaks to
the Koyukon through visible gestures and signs. The way a raven
flies in the wind, swerving or gliding upside down, may indicate suc-
cess or failure in the hunt; the movements of other animals may in-
dicate the presence of danger, or the approach of a storm, or that the
spring thaw will come early this year. The assumption, common to
alphabetic culture, that “reading omens” is a superstitious and ut-
terly irrational activity, prevents us from recognizing the practical
importance, for foraging peoples, of such careful attention to the be-
havior of the natural surroundings. This watching and interpreting
of the world’s gestures, as if every movement bears a meaning, ac-
cords with a worldview that simply has no notion of pure meaning-
lessness. No event for the Koyukon is ever wholly accident or
chance, but neither is any event entirely predetermined. Rather like
the trickster, Raven, who first gave it its current form, the sensuous
world is a spontaneous, playful, and dangerous mystery in which we
participate, an animate and articulate field of powers ever responsive
to human actions and spoken words.

154 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

The storied Earth

We have begun exploring some evidence for the thesis that language,
in indigenous oral cultures, is experienced not as the exclusive prop-
erty of humankind, but as a property of the sensuous life-world.
We’ ve been pondering, that is, some of the ways in which the human
discourse within indigenous, oral communities responds directly
to the felt expressiveness of other species, of the elements, of the
intelligent, animate earth. I have drawn some obvious examples
from an equatorial culture embedded in the Amazonian jungle and
from a society of the subarctic taiga, or boreal forest. Let’s now shift
our attention away from forests, whether equatorial or subarctic, to-
ward the arid, desert ecology of the American southwest—in partic-
ular, toward the terrain inhabited by the Western Apache of
Arizona.?”

The Apache languages are, like Koyukon, part of the vast Atha-
paskan family of languages, but the Apachean peoples split off from
the northern Athapaskans around one thousand years ago, and even-
tually established themselves in the American Southwest. In turning
from Koyukon culture to Apache culture, we move from an indige-
nous community that, by virtue of its semiarctic location, has until
recently been well insulated from the full impact of European civi-
lization, to a native society that, at least since being confined to the
Fort Apache Indian Reservation in 1872, has been surrounded and
circumscribed by an ever-expanding population of European set-
tlers. Yet the Apache, despite multiple generations of confrontation,
confinement, and forced assimilation, have retained many of their
distinct lifeways and linguistic practices. Keith Basso is a linguistic
anthropologist who has worked with the Western Apache from 1959
until the present, living intermittently at Cibecue (from the Apache
phrase deeschii bikoh—“valley with elongated red bluffs”), a village
of about eleven hundred people that has been inhabited by the
Apache for centuries.

As he became conversant in the Apache language, and attuned to
the rhythms of life in the village, Basso began to notice the remark-
able frequency with which place-names typically arise in Western

In the Landscape of Language 155

Apache discourse.*® The Apache seem to take great pleasure simply
in uttering the native names of various locations within the Cibecue
valley. For instance, while stringing a fence with two Apache cow-
boys, Basso noticed one of them talking quietly to himself. When he
listened more closely, Basso discovered that the man was reciting a
long series of place-names—“punctuated only by spurts of tobacco
juice”—that went on for almost ten minutes. Later, when Basso
asked him what he’d been doing, the man replied that he often
“talked names” to himself. “I like to,” he told the anthropologist. “I
ride that way in my mind.” Another Apache told Basso that his peo-
ple like to pronounce place-names “because those names are good to
say.”3?

The evident pleasure derived from saying these names is clearly
linked to the precision with which Apache place-names depict the
actual places that they name. Basso himself mapped 104 square
kilometers in and around Cibecue, and within this area recorded
the Apache names of 296 locations. He found that all but a few
of these place-names take the form of complete sentences, each
name invoking its place through a succinct yet precise visual de-
scription. Here are a few such names: “big cottonwood trees
stand spreading here and there”; “coarse textured rocks lie above in
a compact cluster”; “water flows down on top of a regular succes-
sion of flat rocks.”*? Upon pronouncing, or hearing, such a
name, Apache persons straightaway feel themselves in the presence
of that place; hence, when reciting a series of place-names, the
Apache experience themselves “traveling in their minds.” It would
seem that the spoken place-names, by their precision, effect a
direct sensorial bond between Apache persons and particular places,
and we may suspect that the benefit drawn from speaking these
names aloud derives not so much from the names themselves but
from the nourishing power of the actual locations to which the
names draw those who speak them. Place-names, that is, seem to
take their particular power and magic from the actual places that
they designate.

The experiential importance of geographic place for the Western
Apache, and the consequent influence of particular locations in
the surrounding landscape upon their everyday language, is espe-
cially evident with regard to the ethics and etiquette of contempo-

156 ‘THE'SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

rary Apache society. For, in a manner entirely alien to alphabetic
civilization, the land itself is the ever-vigilant guardian of right be-
havior within traditional Apache culture. According to Mrs. Annie
Peaches, a seventy-seven-year-old Apache woman:

The land is always stalking people. The land makes people live
right. The land looks after us. The land looks after people.*!

The moral efficacy of the landscape—this power of the land to
ensure mindful and respectful behavior in the community—is medi-
ated by a whole class of stories that are regularly recounted within
the village. These narratives tell of persons who underwent misfor-
tune as a consequence of violating Apache standards for right be-
havior; they tell of individuals who, as a result of acting impulsively
or in open defiance of Apache custom, suffered humiliation, illness,
or death. Unlike the long cosmological myths told only by medicine
persons, and unlike the sagas of the contemporary world told pri-
marily for entertainment, these tales—called ‘agodzaahi (literally,
“that which has happened”)—are typically very brief; they can usu-
ally be told in less than five minutes. More significantly, ‘“agodzaahi
tales always begin and end with a statement that indicates, with a
place-name, exactly where the events in the story actually occurred.
Here is an example of such a story:

It happened at “whiteness spreads out descending to water.”

Long ago, a boy went out to hunt deer. He rode on horseback.
Pretty soon he saw one [a deer], standing on the side of a canyon.
Then he went closer and shot it. He killed it. Then the deer rolled
all the way down to the bottom of the canyon.

Then the boy went down there. It was a buck, fat and muscu-
lar. There he butchered it. The meat was heavy, so he had to carry
it up in pieces. He hada hard time reaching the top of the canyon
‘with each piece.

Now it was getting dark. One hindquarter was still lying at
the bottom of the canyon. “I have enough meat already,” he
thought. So he left the hindquarter where it was lying. He left it
there.

In the Landscape of Language 157

Then he packed his horse and started to ride home. Then the
boy got dizzy and nearly fell off his horse. Then his nose twitched
uncontrollably, like Deer’s nose does. Then pain shot up behind
his eyes. Then he became scared.

Now he went back to the canyon. It was dark when he got
there. He walked down to where the hindquarter was lying—but
it was gone! Then he returned to his horse. He rode fast to where
he was living with his relatives.

The boy was sick for a long time. The people prayed for him
on four separate occasions. He got better slowly.

Some time after that, when the boy had grown to manhood, he
always had bad luck in hunting. No deer would present them-
selves to him. He said to his children: “Look at me now. I failed
to be careful when I was a boy and now I have a hard time getting
meat for you to eat.”

It happened at “whiteness spreads out descending to water.”*?

This tale of “that which has happened” illustrates the misfor-
tunes that might befall a hunter who neglects the respect that must
be continually maintained with his animal prey, or, more broadly, the
strife that attends those who fail to observe the proper etiquette in
their interactions with the natural world. Yet many ‘agodzaahi tales
deal solely with the right relations that must be sustained between
individual persons and the larger tribal community:

It happened at “men stand above here and there.”

Long ago, a man killed a cow off the reservation. The cow
belonged to a Whiteman. The man was arrested by a police-
man living at Cibecue at “men stand above here and there.” The
policeman was an Apache. The policeman took the man to the
head Army officer at Fort Apache. There, at Fort Apache, the
head Army officer questioned him. “What do you want?” he said.
The policeman said, “I need cartridges and food.” The police-
man said nothing about the man who had killed the Whiteman’s
cow. That night some people spoke to the policeman. “It is best
to report on him,” they said to him. The next day the policeman

158 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

returned to the head Army officer. “Now what do you want?” he
said. The policeman said, “Yesterday I was going to say
‘HELLO’ and ‘GOODBYFE’ [to you] but I forgot to do it.” Again
he said nothing about the man he arrested. Someone was work-
ing with words on his mind. The policeman returned with the
man to Cibecue. He released him at “men stand above here and
there.”

It happened at “men stand above here and there.”*?

This particular story demonstrates the confusion that befalls an
Apache person who acts too much like a white man. In the early
years of the reservation, disease and malnutrition took the lives of
many tribespeople. And so it is perfectly understandable to the
Apache people that one of them would have killed a white man’s cow
for food. It was not acceptable, however, that another Apache would
arrest him with the intent of taking him to jail. In other words, it is
wrong to join with outsiders against members of one’s own com-
munity, or to flaunt one’s disrespect for the tribe by taking on the
attitudes and mannerisms of white men or women. Hence, the po-
liceman in the story found himself unable to turn in the man that he
had arrested, although he twice attempted to do so. Unable to speak
his purpose, he was humiliated and made to look foolish before the
head officer. Finally, he released the man at the same place where he
had arrested him.

Now let us see how the actual place where these events unfolded
contributes to the operative potency of the ‘agodzaahi tales. The
telling of any such tale today is always prompted by a misdeed com-
mitted by someone in the community; the ‘agodzaahi story, precisely
told, acts as a remedial response to that misdeed.** Thus, when an
Apache person offends the community by a certain action, one of his
or her elders will wait for an appropriate moment—perhaps at a
community gathering—and will then “shoot” the person by re-
counting an appropriate ‘agodzaahi story. Although the offender is
not identified or named aloud, he or she will know, if the “arrow”
(the tale) has been well chosen and well aimed, that he is the target;
he will feel the story penetrate deep beneath his skin and sap his
strength, making him feel ill and weak.> Then the story will begin

In the Landscape of Language 159

to work on him from within, making him want to change his ways, to
“replace himself,” to live right. And so his behavior will change. Yet
the story will stay with him. For he will continually encounter the
place in the land where it all happened. Perhaps, if that location is
near his home. he will see it everyday. The place, it is said, will keep
“stalking” him.*®

Basso himself relates an example of such a story “going to work”
on a person. In June 1977 he was present at a birthday party in
Cibecue that was also attended by a young woman who two weeks
earlier had gone to a girls’ puberty ceremonial with her hair rolled
up in a set of oversized pink plastic curlers. Although such ornamen-
tation was no doubt considered fashionable at the off-reservation
boarding school where the young woman lived, it was a clear affront
to Apache custom to appear thus adorned at a traditional ceremony.
Two weeks later, Basso recalls, in the midst of casual conversation at
the birthday party, the young woman’s maternal grandmother sud-
denly narrated a version of the above ‘agodzaahi tale regarding the
Apache policeman who had behaved overmuch like a white man.
Shortly after hearing the story, the young woman stood up and
silently walked away from the party. When Basso, uncertain of what
had happened, asked her grandmother if the woman was ill, the
grandmother replied simply, “No. I shot her with an arrow.”*”

‘Two summers later Basso again met the young woman and, while
helping her home with some groceries, asked if she remembered that
party and why she had left so suddenly. The woman then told him
that she had thrown the curlers away after hearing the story about
the policeman. When Basso pointed out, as they passed it, the place
where the story’s events occurred (“men stand above here and
there”), the woman “said nothing for several moments. Then she
smiled and spoke softly in her own language: ‘I know that place. It
stalks me every day.’ ”*8

In this uniquely oral form of community censure, a topographic
place becomes the guarantor of corrected behavior, the visible pres-
ence that reminds one of past foibles and that ensures one’s subse-
quent attentiveness. The telling of ‘agodzaahi tales establishes an
almost familial bond between the persons at whom the stories are
aimed and particular sites or features of the natural landscape. Ac-
cording to an Apache elder,

160 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

[i]t doesn’t matter if you get old—that place will keep on stalking
you like the one who shot you with the story. Maybe that person
will die. Even so, that place will keep on stalking you. It’s like that
person is still alive.*”

Hence, Apache persons often associate places with particular ances-
tors. Indeed, the earthly places seem to speak to certain persons
in the voices of those grandparents who first “shot” them with sto-
ries, or even to speak in the voices of those long-dead ancestors
whose follies and exploits are related in the ‘agodzaahi tales.*° The
ancestral wisdom of the community resides, as it were, in the stories,
but the stories—and even the ancestors themselves—reside in the

land.

We used to survive only off the land. Now its no longer that way.
Now we live only with money, so we need jobs. But the land still
looks after us. We know the names of the places where everything
happened. So we stay away from badness.*!

Yet to move away from the land is ultimately to lose contact with the
actual sites invoked by the place-names, and so to lose touch with the
spoken stories that reside in those places.

One time I went to L.A., training for mechanic. It was no good,
sure no good. I start drinking, hang around bars all the time. I
start getting into trouble with my wife, fight sometimes with her.
It was bad. I forget about this country here around Cibecue. I for-
get all the names and stories. I don’t hear them in my mind any-
more. | forget how to live right, forget how to be strong.*

Basso, the anthropologist, presents a largely functional explana-
tion for the native association of moral teachings with geographical
sites. “Mountains and arroyos,” he writes, “step in symbolically for
grandmothers and uncles.”*? Persons must be continually attentive
to maintaining right behavior, especially with regard to those situa-
tions in which they were once careless and impulsive, and yet the
grandmothers and uncles who originally corrected such behavior nec-
essarily grow old and perish. Since earthly sites readily outlast one’s

In the Landscape of Language 161

human elders, and indeed maintain their basic character across many
generations, such places are perfectly suited to “step in” as ever-
present symbolic reminders of the moral lessons learned in the past.**

Yet Basso’s suggestion that the sites in the land serve a “sym-
bolic” function (that they have come to “symbolize” moral teach-
ings) implies an unwarranted degree of arbitrariness to the
association between moral lessons and the natural landscape, by im-
plying that the association is more conceptual or pragmatic than it is
organic and unavoidable. The suggestion masks the extent to which
the places themselves may be felt to be the active instigators of those
painful lessons, the ultimate authors of those events and hence those
stories. Note, here, Basso’s own stress on the primacy of place in
Western Apache storytelling:

Nothing is considered more basic to the effective telling of a
Western Apache “story” or “narrative”... than identifying the
geographical locations at which events in the story unfold. For
unless Apache listeners are able to picture a physical setting for
narrated events (unless, as one of my consultants said, “your
mind can travel to the place and really see it”), the events them-
selves will be difficult to imagine. This is because events in the
narrative will seem to “happen nowhere” (dohwaa‘agodzaa da),
and such an idea, Apaches assert, is both preposterous and dis-
quieting. Placeless events are an impossibility, everything that
happens must happen somewhere. The location of an event is an
integral aspect of the event itself, and therefore identifying the
event’s location is essential to properly depicting—and effectively

picturing—the event’s occurrence.»

Basso makes evident here the central importance of place in the
Western Apache experience of phenomena. Yet he provides no indi-
cation of why the Apache should put so much more stress on geo-
graphical location than we do. Surely for non-native persons, as well,
“all things that happen must happen somewhere.” Yet most of us do
not insist on identifying the precise location of every event we hear
about. Why, then, do the Apache, and native cultures in general, give
so much importance to places?

The answer should by now be obvious. To members of a non-

162 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

writing culture, places are never just passive settings. Remember
that in oral cultures the human eyes and ears have not yet shifted
their synaesthetic participation from the animate surroundings to
the written word. Particular mountains, canyons, streams, boulder-
strewn fields, or groves of trees have not yet lost the expressive
potency and dynamism with which they spontaneously present
themselves to the senses. A particular place in the land is never, for
an oral culture, just a passive or inert setting for the human events
that occur there. It 1s an active participant in those occurrences. In-
deed, by virtue of its underlying and enveloping presence, the place
may even be felt to be the source, the primary power that expresses
itself through the various events that unfold there.

It is precisely for this reason that stories are not told without
identifying the earthly sites where the events in those stories occur.
For the Western Apache, as for other traditionally oral peoples,
human events and encounters simply cannot be isolated from the
places that engender them. Thus, anthropologist Harry Hojier,
speaking of another Athapaskan group—the Diné, or Navajo—
notes:

Even the most minute occurrences are described by Navajos in
close conjunction with their physical settings, suggesting that un-
less narrated events are spatially anchored their significance is
somehow reduced and cannot be properly assessed.*°

Yet here again the professional anthropologist subtly misses the pri-
mary reason for this conjunction. By suggesting that narrated events
must be “spatially anchored” he allows us to assume a purely exter-
nal relation between events and their geographical settings; he im-
plies that the events could be conceived as floating free of any locale
before dropping anchor and binding themselves to the land. If, how-
ever, the place is itself an active element in the genesis of the event,
then the metaphor of a root is far more precise than that of an an-
chor; to an oral culture, experienced events remain rooted in the par-
ticular soils, the particular ecologies, the particular places that give
rise to them.

In the Landscape of Language 163

FROM THE DISTANT TIME STORIES OF THE KOYUKON PEOPLE, AND
from the ‘agodzaahi tales of the Western Apache, we begin to dis-
cern that storytelling is a primary form of human speaking, a mode
of discourse that continually weds the human community to the
land. Among the Koyukon, the Distant Time stories serve, among
other things, to preserve a link between human speech and the spo-
ken utterances of other species, while for the Western Apache the
‘agodzaahi narratives express a deep association between moral be-
havior and the land and, when heard, are able to effect a lasting kin-
ship between persons and particular places.

The telling of stories, like singing and praying, would seem to be
an almost ceremonial act, an ancient and necessary mode of speech
that tends the earthly rootedness of human language. For narrated
events, as Basso reminds us, always happen somewhere. And for an
oral culture, that locus is never merely incidental to those occur-
rences. The events belong, as it were, to the place, and to tell the
story of those events is to let the place itself speak through the
telling.

Yet there remains another reason for the profound association be-
tween storytelling and the more-than-human terrain. It resides in
the encompassing, enveloping wholeness of a story in relation to the
characters that act and move within it. A story envelops its protago-
nists much as we ourselves are enveloped by the terrain. In other
words, we are situated in the land in much the same way that charac-
ters are situated in a story. Indeed, for the members of a deeply oral
culture this relation may be experienced as something more than a
mere analogy: along with the other animals, the stones, the trees, and
the clouds, we ourselves are characters within a huge story that is
visibly unfolding all around us, participants within the vast imagina-
tion, or Dreaming, of the world.

Dreamtime

With this thought we bring ourselves very close to the Dream-
time beliefs common to the Aboriginal peoples of Australia. Their

164 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

diverse cultures—Pintupi, Pitjantjatjara, Aranda, Kaititj, Waru-
mungu, Walbiri, and a host of others—may well be the oldest
human cultures of any still in existence, cultures that have evolved
in some of the harshest of human environments for tens of thou-
sands of years (the earliest Aboriginal remains discovered in Aus-
tralia are between forty thousand and sixty thousand years old), only
to be decimated in our own time through contact with alphabetic
civilization. The astonishing endurance of the Aboriginal peoples
must be attributed, at least partially, to their minimal involvement
with technologies. Their relation to the sustaining landscape was di-
rect and intimate, unencumbered by unnecessary mediations. They
relied upon only the simplest of tools—primarily the boomerang,
the hunting spear, and the digging stick—and thus avoided depen-
dence upon specialized resources while maintaining the greatest
possible mobility in the face of climatic changes. Meanwhile, the
isolation of their continent, as well as its outwardly inhospitable
character, clearly protected these peoples from onslaught by more
ambitious or expansionist nations—until, that is, the British arrived
on their coast in 1788.

What, then, zs the Dreamtime—the Jukurrpa, or Alcheringa—
that plays such a prominent part in the mythology of Aboriginal
Australia?

It is a kind of time out of time, a time hidden beyond or even
within the evident, manifest presence of the land, a magical tempo-
rality wherein the powers of the surrounding world first took up
their current orientation with regard to one another, and hence ac-
quired the evident shapes and forms by which we now know them.
It is that time before the world itself was entirely awake (a time that
still exists just below the surface of wakeful awareness)—that dawn
when the totem Ancestors first emerged from their slumber beneath
the ground and began to sing their way across the land in search of
food, shelter, and companionship.

The earth itself was still in a malleable, half-awake state, and as
Kangaroo Dreaming Man (the ancestral progenitor not only of kan-
garoos but of all humans who are born of Kangaroo Dreaming),
Frilled Lizard Man, Tortoise Woman, Little Wallaby Man, Emu
Woman, and innumerable other Ancestors wandered, singing,
across its surface, they shaped that surface by their actions, forming

In the Landscape of Language 165

plains where they lay down, creeks or waterholes where they uri-
nated, forests where they kicked up dust, and so on.

Gabidji, Little Wallaby, came from the West to Ooldea Soak. He
came across the large western sand-ridge, close to a black desert-
oak tree. He was carrying a malu-meri or buda skin waterbag,
which was full. He crossed the ridge and came to Yuldi. There he
put his buda at the base of a large sand dune to the south, and uri-
nated in a depression which became the present-day Ooldea Soak
(“That’s the water we drink now!” said the people in 1941.) He
stayed there for a while, and then went on to another sandhill to
the north; from there he looked out toward the east. That sandhill
was named Bimbali. He returned to pick up his buda, and then he
spilt a little water, and that became the lake. However, he was not
sure whether he should go farther and finally decided to return to
Ooldea. He left his buda there and it was metamorphosed as the
large southern sandhill. “That’s why there is always water there.”
He camped for a while, then decided to go east again. . . .>”

Eventually, having found an appropriate location, or simply ex-
hausted from the work of world-shaping, each of the Ancestors went
“back in” (becoming djang, in Gunwinggu terminology),°® trans-
forming himself (or herself) into some physical aspect of the land,
and/or metamorphosing into the plant or animal species from which
he takes his name.

[Leech Man] looked this way, that way, as he was coming. He saw
a good place. He said, “I do this, because it’s a good place. I'll set-
tle down, I'll stay always.” That man who was eating fish,
Naberg-gaidmi, asked him, “What are you?,” and he said, “I’m
turning into Leech, I’m going to stay in one place. I’m going to
become a rock, a little rock, and stay here, with a flat head, a short
head. I’m Leech djang, Leech Dreaming!” he said. “I’m Leech!”
and he said, “Here I sit. This is my creek flowing, this is mine,
where I’m staying. I’m djang, Dreaming!”>?

Each Ancestor thus leaves in his wake a meandering trail of geo-
graphic sites, perceivable features in the land that are the result of

166 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

particular events and encounters in that Ancestor’s journey, culmi-
nating in that place where the Ancestor went “back in,” metamor-
phosing entirely into some aspect of the world we now experience.

These meandering trails, or Dreaming tracks, are auditory as well
as visible and tactile phenomena, for the Ancestors were singing the
names of things and places into the land as they wandered through
it. Indeed, each ancestral track is a sort of musical score that winds
across the continent, the score of a vast, epic song whose verses tell
of the Ancestor’s many adventures, of how the various sites along
her path came into being (and hence, indirectly, of what food plants,
water sources, or sheltering rocks may be found at those sites). The
distance between two significant sites along the Ancestor’s track can
be measured, or spoken of, as a stretch of song, for the song unfolds
in an unbroken chain of couplets across the land, one couplet “for
each pair of the Ancestor’s footfalls.”®’ The song is thus a kind
of auditory route map through the country; in order to make her
way through the land, an Aboriginal person has only to chant the
local stanzas of the appropriate Dreaming, the appropriate Ances-
tor’s song.

The Australian continent is crisscrossed by thousands of such
meandering “songlines” or “ways through,” most of them passing
through multiple tribal areas. A given song may thus sing its way
through twenty or more different languages before reaching the
place where the Ancestor went “back in.” Yet while the language
changes, the basic melody of the song remains the same, so that a
person of the Barking Lizard Clan will readily recognize distant
stretches of the Barking Lizard songline when he hears them, even
though those stanzas are being sung in a language entirely alien to
his ears... .°1 Knowledge of distant parts of one’s song cycle—al-
beit in one’s own language—apparently enables a person to vividly
experience certain stretches of the land even before he or she has ac-
tually visited those places. Rehearsing a long part of a song cycle to-
gether while sitting around a campfire at night, Aboriginal persons
apparently feel themselves journeying across the land in their collec-
tive imagination—much as the Apache man “talking names” to him-
self is “riding in his mind.”

Every Ancestor, while chanting his or her way across the land
during the Dreamtime, also deposited a trail of “spirit children”

In the Landscape of Language 167

along the line of his footsteps. These “life cells” are children not yet
born: they lie in a kind of potential state within the ground, waiting.
While sexual intercourse between a woman and a man is thought, by
traditional Aboriginal persons, to prepare the woman for conception,
the actual conception is assumed to occur much later, when the al-
ready pregnant woman is out on her daily round gathering roots and
edible grubs, and she happens to step upon (or even near) a song
couplet. The “spirit child” lying beneath the ground at that spot
slips up into her at that moment, “works its way into her womb, and
impregnates the foetus with song.”®? Wherever the woman finds her-
self when she feels the quickening—the first kick within her womb—
she knows that a spirit child has just leapt into her body from the
earth. And so she notes the precise place in the land where the quick-
ening occurred, and reports this to the tribal elders. The elders then
examine the land at that spot, discerning which Ancestor’s songline
was involved, and precisely which stanzas of that Ancestor’s song
will belong to the child.

In this manner every Aboriginal person, at birth, inherits a par-
ticular stretch of song as his private property, a stretch of song that
is, as it were, his title to a stretch of land, to his conception site. This
land is that part of the Dreaming from whence his life comes—it
is that place on the earth where he most belongs, and his essence, his
deepest self, is indistinguishable from that terrain:

Nyunymanu:
dingo [wild dog] dreaming place
Paddy Anatani’s country.

Old man squints between wrinkles
drawn into a smile in the broad, red land.
Played a child; walked every foot in its sand.

“You see that rock over there?”

(The top had been rubbed smooth and

flat soft, as if it were cut by a diamond, but
its been done by another rock

cupped in hundreds of hands:

168 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

increase site for birthing of dingo pup)
and
Paddy Anatari strokes the rock again,

and again. He says:
“You see this rock?

This rock’s me!”®*

The sung verses that are the tribesman’s birthright, of which he
is now the primary caretaker, provide him also with a kind of pass-
port to the other lands or territories that are crossed by the same
Dreaming. He is recognized as an offspring of that Ancestor whose
songline he owns a part of, a descendant of the Dreamtime Being
whose sacred life and power still dwells within the shapes of those
lands. If, for instance, the Ancestor who walked there was Wallaby
Man, then the person is said to have a Wallaby Dreaming, to be a
member of the Wallaby Clan (a wallaby is a marsupial animal re-
sembling a small kangaroo). He has allegiances to all other Wallaby
Dreaming persons, both within and outside of his own tribe. He has
responsibilities to the wallabies themselves; he cannot hunt them for
food, since they are his brothers and sisters. And he has a profound
responsibility to the land along the Wallaby Dreaming track, or
songline, a responsibility to keep the land as it should be—the way it
was when it was first sung into existence.

According to tradition, he might do this by periodically going
“Walkabout,” by making a ritual journey along the Dreaming track,
walking in the footsteps of the clan Ancestor. As he walks, he chants
the Ancestor’s verses, without altering a single word, singing the
land into view—and in this manner “recreates the Creation.”®

Finally, just as each Dreamtime Ancestor metamorphosed him-
or-herself, at the end of her journey, into some aspect or feature
within the contemporary landscape, so also each Aboriginal person
intends, at the end of his or her life, to sing himself back into the
land. A traditional Pitjantjatjara or Pintupi man will return to his
conception site—to his particular stretch of the Ancestral songline—
to die, so that his vitality will be able to rejoin the dreaming earth at
that place.

In the Landscape of Language 169

The Dreamtime is not, like the Western, biblical notion of Gen-
esis, a finished event; it is not, like the common scientific interpreta-
tion of the “Big Bang,” an event that happened once and for all in
the distant past. Rather, it is an ongoing process—the perpetual
emerging of the world from an incipient, indeterminate state into
full, waking reality, from invisibility to visibility, from the secret
depths of silence into articulate song and speech. That Native Aus-
tralians chose the English term “Dreaming” to translate this cosmo-
logical notion indicated their sense that the ordinary act of dreaming
participates directly in the time of the clan Ancestors, and hence that
that time is not entirely elsewhere, not entirely sealed off from the
perceivable present.® Rather, the Dreaming lies in the same relation
to the open presence of ‘the earth around us as our own dream life
lies in relation to our conscious or waking experience. It is a kind of
depth, ambiguous and metamorphic.

[See there,] That tree is a digging stick

left by the giant woman who was looking

for honey ants;

That rock, a dingo’s nose;

There, on that mountain, is the footprint

left by Tjangara on his way to Ulamburra;

Here, the rockhole of Warnampi—wery dangerous—
and the cave where the nyi-nyi women escaped

the anger of marapulpa—the spider.

Wati Kutjarra—the two brothers—travelled this way.
There, you can see, one was tired

from too much lovemaking—the mark of his penis
dragging on the ground;

Here, the bodies of the honey ant men

where they crawled from the sand—

no, they are not dead—they keep coming

from the ground, moving toward the water at Warumpi—
it has been like this for many years:

the Dreaming does not end; it is not like the whiteman’s way.
What happened once happens again and again.

This ts the Law,

This is the power of the Song.

170 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

Through the singing we keep everything alive;
through the songs .. . the spirits keep us alive.*®

What happened once happens again and again. The Dreaming, the
imaginative life of the land itself, must be continually renewed, and
as an Aboriginal man walks along his Ancestor’s Dreaming track,
singing the country into visibility, he virtually becomes the journey-
ing Ancestor, and thus the storied earth is born afresh.

This identification, this bleeding of the Dreamtime into the here
and now, happens not just during the solitary Walkabout, but also
and especially during the collective rituals held at specific Dreaming
sites, rituals wherein the Ancestors’ encounters and adventures at
those locations are not just sung but also enacted by the elders. Even
an “open,” greatly abbreviated version of such an enactment can
display an astonishing degree of participation with the animal An-
cestor (such “open” versions, or sketches, may be performed for
strangers). Author Bruce Chatwin witnesses one such sketch by a
late-night campfire in the outback. In response to a question from
Chatwin’s fellow researcher, about the significance of a nearby hill,
one of the Aboriginal men

got to his feet and began to mime (with words of pidgin thrown
in) the travels of the Lizard Ancestor.

It was a song of how the lizard and his lovely young wife had
walked from northern Australia to the Southern Sea, and of how
a southerner had seduced the wife and sent him home with a sub-
stitute.

I don’t know what species of lizard he was supposed to be:
whether he was a “jew-lizard” or a “road-runner” or one of those
rumpled, angry looking lizards with ruffs around their necks. All
I do know is that the man in blue made the most lifelike lizard you
could ever hope to imagine.

He was male and female, seducer and seduced. He was glutton,
he was cuckold, he was weary traveller. He would claw his lizard-
feet sideways, then freeze and cock his head. He would lift his
lower lid to cover the iris, and flick out his lizard-tongue. He
puffed his neck into goiters of rage; and at last, when it was time
for him to die, he writhed and wriggled, his movements growing
fainter and fainter. ...

In the Landscape of Language 171

Then his jaw locked, and that was the end.

The man in blue waved towards the hill and, with the tri-
umphant cadence of someone who has told the best of all possi-
ble stories, shouted: “That. . . that is where he is!”®?

The nearby hill, in other words, is that place where the Lizard An-
cestor had metamorphosed back into the earth—his spirit power, or
life, now inseparable from the life of the hill itself.

The enactment of such stories, songs, and ceremonies is done less
for the human persons than for the land itself—upon which, of
course, the humans depend. In the words of anthropologist Helen
Payne:

The maintenance of a site requires both physical caring—for ex-
ample the rubbing of rocks or clearing of debris—and the perfor-
mance of [ritual] items aimed at caring for the spirit housed at it.
Without these maintenance processes the site remains, but is said
to lose the spirit held within it. It is then said to die and all those
who share physical features and spiritual connections with it are
then also thought to die. Thus, to endure the well-being of life,
sites must be cared for and rites performed to keep alive the
dreaming powers entrapped within them.”°

Or as Bruce Chatwin writes, “an unsung land is a dead land.””!

On certain occasions, traditionally, the elders of a particular clan
would decide that it was time to sing their song cycle in all of its in-
tricacies from start to finish. Messages would be sent up and down
the Dreaming track, summoning all of the song-owners to gather at
one of the important water holes along the Dreaming. Once assem-
bled, each clan member in turn would sing his stretch of the Ances-
tor’s footprints. The precise sequence of the chanted verses was
essential; to sing one’s stanzas out of order was thought to rupture
the coherence of the earth itself.

It is important to realize that in Aboriginal Australia (as through-
out indigenous North America) there is a high degree of differenti-
ation between women’s knowledge and men’s knowledge, women’s
rituals and men’s rituals. The power and importance of women’s
rites within native Australian cultures has only recently been recog-

172 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

nized by nonaboriginal researchers, perhaps because most of the
early ethnologists were male, and hence had little or no access to
women’s sacred knowledge. It is now apparent, as well, that Aborig-
inal women’s song knowledge is more closely guarded than that of
the men. In recent years a certain amount of innovation has oc-
curred both in the songs sung by women and those sung by men, es-
pecially in response to changes in the landscape, and in Aboriginal
society, brought about by industrial civilization. Lost segments of a
song cycle, for instance, may be redreamed by qualified persons.
Nevertheless, the song knowledge of women (at least in central Aus-
tralia) has tended to be more conservative, more resistant to change
than that of the men.”” Another difference is this: while men’s secret
ceremonies seem to focus almost exclusively on renewing the vitality
of the particular sites and species being celebrated, women’s closed
ceremonies often involve, as well, utilizing the songs to tap the magic
power of those sites—drawing upon the power in the land for vari-
ous practical purposes. Such purposes include the curing of illness
(whether the sick person is female or male), as well as the practice of
“love magic”—whereby the women elders influence, for the good of
the community as a whole, the flows of desire between particular

persons.’3

Place and Memory

In Australia, then, among the least technological of human cultures,
we find the most intimate possible relation between land and human
language. Language here is inseparable from song and story, and the
songs and stories, in turn, are inseparable from the shapes and fea-
tures of the land. The chanting of any part of a song cycle links the
human singer to one of the animals or plants or powers within the
landscape, to Crocodile Man or Pandanus Tree Woman or Thun-
derstorm Man—to whatever more-than-human being first chanted
those verses as he or she wandered across the dreaming earth. But it
also binds the human singer to the land itself, to the specific hills,

In the Landscape of Language 173

rocks, and streambeds that are the visible correlate of those sung
stanzas.

The lived affinity between language and the land is well illus-
trated by an anecdote that American poet Gary Snyder tells, from a
visit that he made to Australia in the fall of 1981. Snyder was travel-
ing through part of the central desert in the back of a pickup truck,
accompanied by a Pintupi elder named Jimmy Tjungurrayi. As the
truck rolled down the road, the old aborigine began to speak very
rapidly to Snyder, telling him a Dreamtime story about some Wal-
laby people and their encounter with some Lizard girls at a moun-
tain they could see from the road. As soon as that story ended, he
launched into

another story about another hill over here and another story over
there. I couldn’t keep up. I realized after about half an hour of
this that these were tales meant to be told while walking, and that
I was experiencing a speeded-up version of what might be
leisurely told over several days of foot travel.”4

A similar tale is told by Chatwin. He was traveling in a Land Cruiser
with several friends, including an Aboriginal man nicknamed Limpy
whom they were driving to a particular place on his songline. Limpy,
whose clan Ancestor was the Native Cat, or tyilpa (a small marsupial
with a long, banded tail), had never been to this place along the Na-
tive Cat songline, yet he now wished to go there in order to see some
distant relatives who were dying there. During the course of seven
hours driving through the back country, bumping across shallow
rivers and under gum trees, the Aboriginal man sat motionless in the
front seat, squeezed between the driver, Arkady, and another pas-
senger, except for a short burst of action when the truck crossed part
of his songline. Later,

[w]e came to the confluence of two streams: that is, we met the
stream we had crossed higher up on the main road. This lesser
stream was the route of the Tjilpa Men, and we were joining it at
right angles.

As Arkady turned the wheel to the left, Limpy bounced into

174 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

action. Again he shoved his head through both windows. His eyes
rolled wildly over the rocks, the cliffs, the palms, the water. His
lips moved at the speed of a ventriloquist’s and, through them,
came a rustle: the sound of wind through branches.

Arkady knew at once what was happening. Limpy had learnt
his Native Cat couplets for walking pace, at four miles an hour,
and we were travelling at twenty-five.

Arkady shifted into bottom gear, and we crawled along no
faster than a walker. Instantly, Limpy matched his tempo to the
new speed. He was smiling. His head swayed to and fro. The
sound became a lovely melodious swishing; and you knew that, as

far as he was concerned, he was the Native Cat. .. .75

Such anecdotes make vividly evident the felt correspondence be-
tween the oral language and the landscape, an alliance so thorough
that the speaker must pace his stories or songs to match the speed
with which he moves through the terrain. It is as though specific loci
in the land release specific stories or stanzas in those Aboriginal per-
sons who travel by them. @r as though, at such times, it isnot the na-
tive person who speaks, but rather the land that speaks through him
as he journeys across it.

This correspondence between the speaking voice and the animate
landscape is an intensely felt affinity, a linkage of immense import
for the survival of the people. In a land as dry as the Australian out-
back, where rainfall is always uncertain, the ability to move in re-
sponse to climatic changes is indispensable. An oral Dreaming
cycle, practically considered, is a detailed set of instructions for
moving through the country, a safe way through the arid land-
scape. Anthropologist Helen Payne has analyzed a continuous series
of significant Dreaming sites along a single songline, and found that
each of the sites contained either a source of water, a potential shel-
ter, a high vantage point from which to view the surrounding terrain,
or a Cluster of several such characteristics. Indeed, these Dreaming
sites were the only places with such assets in an otherwise arid
desert.”° 7

Payne found as well that geographic sites of particular abundance
were commonly crossed by more than one Dreaming—having fig-
ured in the adventures of more than one Dreamtime Ancestor—and

In the Landscape of Language 175

were thus sacred to several totemic clans. The number and complex-
ity of the rituals associated with any particular Dreaming site varied
in direct proportion to the abundance of food, water, and/or shelter
to be found at that place.”’

Each person, by borrowing or trading for the right to sing distant
stretches of her own or another’s Dreaming tracks, may continually
expand her knowledge of potential routes through the countryside
along which she may travel in lean times. And since every Aborigi-
nal band is comprised of individuals from different totemic clans, or
Dreamings, it will usually have access to multiple songlines, multiple
ways to move whenever lack of water or food necessitates such a
move.

The Dreaming songs, in other words, provide an auditory
mnemonic (or memory tool)—an oral means of recalling viable routes
through an often harsh terrain.

Yet there is another mnemonic structure at work in the Dream-
ing. The two anecdotes cited above—both of them occurring in
moving automobiles—indicate that the telling of specific stories or
the chanting of particular songs is itself prompted by the sensible
encounter with specific sites. Just as the song structure carries the
memory of how to orient in the land, so the sight of particular fea-
tures in the land activates the memory of specific songs and stories.
The landscape itself, then, provides a visual mnemonic, a set of vi-
sual cues for remembering the Dreamtime stories.

The importance of this second mnemonic relation becomes ap-
parent as soon as we acknowledge that the songs and stories carry
much more than a set of instructions for moving through the terrain.
While the topographic function of the songs is obviously of im-
mense importance, the songs and stories also provide the codes of
behavior for the community; they suggest, through multiple exam-
ples, how to act, or how not to act, in particular situations. The
Dreamtime Ancestors depicted in the stories are neither more nor
less moral than their human progeny inthe contemporary world, yet
the situations in which the Ancestors variously find themselves, and
the often difficult results that follow from particular actions, offer a
ready set of guidelines for proper behavior on the part of those who
sing or hear those stories today. Social taboos, customs, interspecies
etiquette—the right way to hunt particular animals or gather partic-

176 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

ular foods and medicines—all are contained in the Dreamtime songs
and stories. And it is the land itself that is the most potent reminder
of these teachings, since each feature in the landscape activates the
memory of a particular story or cluster of stories.

We earlier encountered a similar correspondence among the
Western Apache, for whom the auditory memory of particular
teaching stories was triggered by contact with the specific sites
where those stories unfolded.” One of the strong claims of this
book is that the synaesthetic association of visible topology with
auditory recall—the intertwining of earthly place with linguistic
memory—is common to almost all indigenous, oral cultures. It is, we
may suspect, a spontaneous propensity of the human organism—
one that is radically transformed, yet not eradicated, by alphabetic
writing.

Indeed, even within European culture there is a celebrated exam-
ple of this propensity, albeit in a thoroughly altered form. In her
justly famous book, The Art of Memory, Frances Yates describes the
mnemonic technique utilized by the classical orators of Greece and
Rome to remember their long speeches (a technique regularly prac-
ticed by rhetoricians up until the spread of typographic texts during
the late Renaissance). The orator would imagine an elaborate palace,
filled with diverse halls and rooms and intricate structural details.
He would then envision himself walking through this palace, and
would deposit at various places within the rooms a sequence of
imagined objects associated with the different parts of his planned
speech.’” Thereafter, to recall the entire speech in its correct se-
quence and detail, the orator had only to envision himself once
again walking the same route through the halls and rooms of the
memory palace: each locus encountered on his walk would remind
him of the specific phrase to be spoken or the particular topic to be
addressed at that point within the discourse. Rather than striving to
memorize the composed speech on its own, the orator found it much
easier, and certainly much safer, to correlate the diverse parts of
the speech to diverse places within an imaginary structure, within an
envisioned topology through which he could imaginatively stroll.°°
Yet while the classical orators had to construct and move through
such topological matrices in their private imaginations, the native
peoples of Australia found themselves corporeally immersed in

In the Landscape of Language 177

just such a linguistic-topological field, walking through a material
landscape whose every feature was already resonant with speech and
song!

In aboriginal Australia, then, we can discern two basic mnemonic
relationships between the Dreamtime stories and the earthly land-
scape. First, the spoken or sung Dreamings provide a way of recall-
ing viable routes through an often difficult terrain. Second, the
continual encounter with various features of the surrounding land-
scape stirs the memory of the spoken Dreamings that pertain to
those sites. While the sung stories provide an auditory mnemonic for
orienting within the land, the land itself provides a visual mnemonic
for recalling the Dreamtime stories. Thus, for Aboriginal peoples
the Dreamtime stories and the encompassing terrain are reciprocally
mnemonic, experientially coupled in a process of mutual invocation.
The land and the language—insofar as the language is primarily em-
bodied in the ancestral Dreamings—are inseparable.

Given this radical interdependence between the spoken stories
and the sensible landscape, the ethnographic practice of writing
down oral stories, and subsequently disseminating them in pub-
lished form, must be seen as a peculiar form of violence, wherein the
stories are torn from the visible landforms and topographic features
that materially embody and provoke those stories. For example, The
Speaking Land, Ronald and Catherine Berndt’s published com-
pendium of Aboriginal stories gathered over the course of four
decades of research, is an honorable and meticulous piece of schol-
arship, yet it cannot help but disappoint those readers who hope to
find therein a collection of stirring adventures and vital narratives.
The printed stories seem curious at best, and very poorly plotted at
worst; something seems missing, some key that would unlock the
abstruse logic of these tales. And that key is nothing other than the
living land itself, the expressive physiognomy of the local earth.
What is missing is the silent topography, the sensuous hillsides and
streambeds that pose the place-specific questions to which these sto-
ries all reply. The narratives respond directly to the land, as the land
responds directly to the spoken or sung stories; here, cut off from
that sensuous reference, transposed onto the flat and featureless ter-
rain of the page, the ancient stories begin to lose their Dreaming
power.

178 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

IN THIS CHAPTER WE HAVE PONDERED A FEW OF THE WAYS IN WHICH
the spoken discourse of traditionally oral, tribal cultures remains
bound to the expressive sounds, shapes, and gestures of an animate
earth. In the absence of formal writing systems, human discourse
simply cannot isolate itself from the larger field of expressive mean-
ings in which it participates. Hence, the linguistic patterns of an oral
culture remain uniquely responsive, and responsible, to the more-
than-human life-world, or bioregion, in which that culture is em-
bedded.

It should be easy, now, to understand the destitution of indige-
nous, oral persons who have been forcibly displaced from their tra-
ditional lands. The local earth is, for them, the very matrix of
discursive meaning; to force them from their native ecology (for
whatever political or economic purpose) is to render them speech-
less—or to render their speech meaningless—to dislodge them from
the very ground of coherence. It is, quite simply, to force them out of
their mind. The massive “relocation” or “transmigration” projects
underway in numerous parts of the world today in the name of
“progress” (for example, the forced “relocation” of oral peoples in
Indonesia and Malaysia in order to make way for the commercial
clearcutting of their forests) must be understood, in this light, as in-
stances of cultural genocide.

Yet while such civilizational “progress” rumbles forward, a
mounting resistance is beginning to emerge within technological
civilization itself, fired in part by a new respect for oral modes of
sensibility and awareness. The kinds of studies drawn upon in this
chapter—studies that document the intimate dependence of oral
peoples and their lifeways upon the particularities of the lands that
they inhabit—are today being utilized with increasing effectiveness
to halt, on legal grounds, the industrial exploitation of native lands.
Keith Basso’s documentation of the close relation between Western
Apache teaching stories and the perceivable landscape has already
been used successfully in litigation to protect Western Apache land
and water rights.*! Meanwhile, documentation of the Aboriginal
Dreaming tracks is increasingly utilized in Australian courts of law
to protect vital or sacred sites from further “development.”

In the Landscape of Language 179

For the Amahuaca, the Koyukon, the Western Apache, and the
diverse Aboriginal peoples of Australia—as for numerous indige-
nous, oral cultures—the coherence of human language is inseparable
from the coherence of the surrounding ecology, from the expressive
vitality of the more-than-human terrain. It is the animate earth that
speaks; human speech is but a part of that vaster discourse.

6
Time, Space, and the
Eclipse of the Earth

We must stand apart from the conventions of history, even while using
the record of the past, for the idea of history is itself a western inven-
tion whose central theme is the rejection of habitat. It formulates ex- °
perience outside of nature and tends to reduce place to only a stage
upon which the human drama is enacted. History conceives the past
mainly in terms of biography and nations. It seeks causality in the con-
scious, spiritual, ambitious character of men and memorializes them
in writing. —PAUL SHEPARD

I wonder if the Ground has anything to say? I wonder if the ground is
listening to what is said? —YOUNG CHIEF, of the Cayuses tribe
(upon signing over their lands to the U.S. government, in 1855)

PaRT I: ABSTRACTION

TORIES HOLD, IN THEIR NARRATIVE LAYERS, THE SEDIMENTED
knowledge accumulated by our progenitors. To hear a story
told and retold in one’s childhood, and to recount that tale in

turn when one has earned the right to do so (now inflected by the
patterns of one’s own experience and the rhythms of one’s own
voice), is to actively preserve the coherence of one’s culture. The
practical knowledge, the moral patterns and social taboos, and in-
deed the very language or manner of speech of any nonwriting cul-
ture maintain themselves primarily through narrative chants, myths,
legends, and trickster tales—that is, through the telling of stories.

181

182 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

Yet the stories told within an oral culture are often, as we have
seen, deeply bound to the earthly landscape inhabited by that cul-
ture. The stories, that is, are profoundly and indissolubly place-
specific. The Distant Time stories of the Koyukon, the ‘agodzaahi
tales of the Western Apache, and the Dreaming stories of the Pin-
tupi and Pitjantjatjara present three very different ways whereby
tribal stories weave the people who tell them into their particular
ecologies. Or, still more precisely, three ways in which earthly locales
may speak through the human persons that inhabit them. For mean-
ingful speech is not—in an oral culture—experienced as an exclu-
sively human capacity, but as a power of the enveloping earth itself,
in which humans participate.

The stories of such cultures give evidence, then, of the unique
power of particular bioregions, the unique ways in which different
ecologies call upon the human community. Yet these stories often
provide evidence, as well, about specific sites within those larger re-
gions. In the oral, indigenous world, to tell certain stories without
saying precisely where those events occurred (or, if one is recounting
a vision or dream, to neglect to say where one was when “granted”
the vision), may alone render the telling powerless or ineffective.

The singular magic of a place is evident from what happens
there, from what befalls oneself or others when in its vicinity. To tell
of such events is implicitly to tell of the particular power of that site,
and indeed to participate in its expressive potency. The songs proper
to a specific site will share a common style, a rhythm that matches
the pulse of the place, attuned to the way things happen there—to
the sharpness of the shadows or the rippling speech of water bub-
bling up from the ground. In traditional Ireland, a country person
might journey to one distant spring in order to cure her insomnia, to
another for strengthening her ailing eyesight, and to yet another
to receive insight and protection from thieves. For each spring has
its own powers, its own blessings, and its own curses. Different
gods dwell in different places, and different demons. Each place has
its own dynamism, its own patterns of movement, and these pat-
terns engage the senses and relate them in particular ways, instilling
particular moods and modes of awareness, so that unlettered, oral
people will rightly say that each place has its own mind, its own per-
sonality, its own intelligence.

Time, Space, and the Eclipse of the Earth 183

The Abstraction of Space and Time

As.the technology of writing encounters and spreads through a pre-
viously oral culture, the felt power and personality of particular
places begins to fade. For the stories that express and embody that
power are gradually recorded in writing. Writing down oral stories
renders them separable, for the first time, from the actual places
where the events in those stories occurred. The tales can now be car-
ried elsewhere; they can be read in distant cities or even on alien con-
tinents. The stories, soon, come to seem independent of any specific
locale.

Previously, the power of spoken tales was rooted in the potency
of the particular places where their events unfolded. While the
recounting of certain stories might be provoked by specific social
situations, their instructive value and moral efficacy was often de-
pendent (as we saw with the Western Apache) upon one’s visible or
sensible contact with the actual sites where those stories took place.
Other stories might be provoked by a direct encounter with the
species of bird or animal whose exploits figure prominently in
the tales, or with a particular plant just beginning to flower, or by
local weather patterns and seasonal changes. In such cases, contact
with the regional landscape—and the diverse sites or places within
that landscape—was the primary mnemonic trigger of the oral sto-
ries, and was thus integral to the preservation of those stories, and of
the culture itself.

Once the stories are written down, however, the visible text be-
comes the primary mnemonic activator of the spoken stories—the inked
traces left by the pen as it traverses the page replacing the earthly
traces left by the animals, and by one’s ancestors, in their inter-
actions with the local land. The places themselves are no longer nec-
essary to the remembrance of the stories, and often come to seem
wholly incidental to the tales, the arbitrary backdrops for human
events that might just as easily have happened elsewhere. The trans-
human, ecological determinants of the originally oral stories are no
longer emphasized, and often are written out of the tales entirely. In
this manner the stories and myths, as they lose their oral, performa-

184 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

tive character, forfeit as well their intimate links to the more-than-
human earth. And the land itself, stripped of the particularizing sto-
ries that once sprouted from every cave and streambed and cluster of
trees on its surface, begins to lose its multiplicitous power. The
human senses, intercepted by the written word, are no longer
gripped and fascinated by the expressive shapes and sounds of par-
ticular places. The spirits fall silent. Gradually, the felt primacy of
place is forgotten, superseded by a new, abstract notion of “space” as
a homogeneous and placeless void.

Of course, many factors other than, but linked to, writing, con-
tributed to the loss of a full and differentiated sense of place. The
development of writing in the Middle East, as in China and
Mesoamerica, was accompanied by a large increase in the scale of
human settlements, as well as by a concomitant growth in the human
ability, or willingness, to manipulate and cultivate the earth. Al-
though the earliest shifts from hunting and foraging lifestyles to
more sedentary, agricultural modes of subsistence are very ancient,
and may have been prompted by climatic changes at the end of the
last ice age,' once the agricultural revolution began to accelerate,
writing began to play an important role in the stabilization and sub-
sequent spread of the new, sedentary economies. The ability to pre-
cisely measure and inventory agricultural surpluses, itself made
possible by numerical and linguistic notation, enabled the new,
highly centralized cities to survive and perpetuate themselves—es-
pecially through times of climatic extremity—and ultimately enabled
the commercial trading of surpluses, and the rise of nation-states.
The new concentration of persons within permanent towns and
cities, and the increased dependence upon the regulation and ma-
nipulation of spontaneous natural processes, could only intensify
the growing estrangement of the human senses from the wild, ani-
mate diversity in which those senses had evolved. But my concern in
this work is neither with agriculture nor urbanization—the enor-
mous influences of which have been elucidated in numerous vol-
umes—but rather with the curious question of writing; that is, with
the influence of writing upon the human senses and upon our direct
sensorial experience of the earth around us.

We have seen that alphabetic writing functions to undermine the
embedded, place-specific character of oral cultures in two distinct

Time, Space, and the Eclipse of the Earth 185

but related ways, one basically perceptual, the other primarily lin-
guistic. First, reading and writing, as a highly concentrated form of
participation, displaces the older participation between the human
senses and the earthly terrain (effectively freeing human intention
from the direct dictates of the land). Second, writing down the an-
cestral stories disengages them from particular places. This double
retreat, of the senses and of spoken stories, from the diverse places
that had once gripped them, cleared the way for the notion of a pure
and featureless “space”—an abstract conception that has neverthe-
less come to seem, today, more primordial and veal than the earthly
places in which we remain corporeally embedded.

BUT IF ALPHABETIC WRITING WAS AN IMPORTANT FACTOR IN THE
emergence of abstract, homogeneous “space,” it was no less central
to the emergence of abstract, linear “time.” To indigenous, oral cul-
tures, the ceaseless flux that we call “time” is overwhelmingly cycli-
cal in character. The senses of an oral people are still attuned to the
land around them, still conversant with the expressive speech of the
winds and the forest birds, still participant with the sensuous cos-
mos. Time, in such a world, is not separable from the circular life of
the sun and the moon, from the cycling of the seasons, the death and
rebirth of the animals—from the eternal return of the greening
earth. According to anthropologist Ake Hultkrantz:

Western time concepts include a beginning and an end; American
Indians understand time as an eternally recurring cycle of events
and years. Some Indian languages lack terms for the past and the
future; everything is resting in the present.”

Today it is easy for most of us, living amid the ever-changing
constructions of literate, technological civilization, to conceive and
even feel, behind all the seasonal recurrences in the sensuous terrain,
the inexorable thrust of a linear and irreversible time. But for cul-
tures without writing there is simply no separate vantage point from
which to view and take note of the subtle mutations and variations in
the endless cycles of nature. Those changes that are noticed are
often assumed to be part of other, larger cycles. For the overall tra-

186 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

jectory of the visible, tangible world—the world disclosed to hu-
mankind by our unaided senses—is circular. Thus, in the words of
Hehaka Sapa, or Black Elk, of the Oglala Sioux:

Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle. ...
The Wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nests in
circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours. The sun comes
forth and goes down again in a circle. The moon does the same,
and both are round. ... Even the seasons form a great circle in
their changing, and always come back again to where they were.
The life of aman isa circle from childhood to childhood and so it
is in everything where power moves. .. 2

The curvature of time in oral cultures is very difficult to articu-
late on the page, for it defies the linearity of the printed line. Yet to
fully engage, sensorially, with one’s earthly surroundings is to find
oneself in a world of cycles within cycles within cycles. The ances-
tral stories of an oral culture are recounted again and again—only
thus can they be preserved—and this regular, often periodic repeti-
tion serves to bind the human community to the ceaseless round
dance of the cosmos. The mythic creation stories of these cultures
are not, like Western biblical accounts of the world’s creation, de-
scriptions of events assumed to have happened only once in the far-
off past. Rather, the very telling of these stories actively participates
in a creative process that is felt to be happening right now, an ongoing
emergence whose periodic renewal actually requires such participa-
tion. Mircea Eliade, in his important and enigmatic work Cosmos
and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return, has shown as well as
any scholar the extent to which indigenous peoples inhabit a cyclical
time periodically regenerated through the ritual repetition of mythic
events.* Within “archaic” cultures (Eliade’s term), every effective
activity—from hunting, fishing, and gathering plants, to winning a
sexual partner, constructing a home, or giving birth—is the recur-
rence of an archetypal event enacted by ancestral or totemic powers
in the mythic times.

The myths preserve and transmit the paradigms, the exemplary
models, for all the responsible activities in which men engage. By

Time, Space, and the Eclipse of the Earth 187

virtue of these paradigmatic models revealed to men in mythical
times, the Cosmos and society are periodically regenerated.°

By performing such activities with care, employing the very phrases
and gestures disclosed in the Mythic Time, one actually becomes
the ancestral being, and thus rejuvenates the emergent order of the
world (just as the Pintupi tribesman on Walkabout, walking in the
footsteps of his totem ancestor, is singing the world itself back into
existence).

Even highly unusual, extraordinary events are spontaneously as-
similated to recurrent mythic prototypes. Thus, Cortés’s arrival on
the shores of Mexico is interpreted by the Aztecs as the return of the
minor god Quetzalcoatl to his kingdom (an interpretation instantly
encouraged and exploited by the sly Cortés himself);° similarly Cap-
tain Cook’s arrival in Hawaii is construed by Native Hawaiians as
the return of the deity Lono.’ To oral cultures, and even to a par-
tially literate society like the Aztec (whose largely pictorial writing
remained perceptually bound to the visible forms of surrounding
nature), human events take on meaning only to the extent that they
can be located within a storied universe that continually retells itself;
unprecedented events, singular encounters that have no place among
the cycling stories, can have no place, either, among the turning sea-
sons or the cycles of earth and sky. The multiple ritual enactments,
the initiatory ceremonies, the annual songs and dances of the hunt
and the harvest—all are ways whereby indigenous peoples-of-place
actively engage the rhythms of the more-than-human cosmos, and
thus embed their own rhythms within those of the vaster round.

, A

THE ALPHABET ALTERS ALL THIS. INORDER TO READ PHONETICALLY,
we must disengage the synaesthetic participation between our senses
and the encompassing earth. The letters of the alphabet, each refer-
ring to a particular sound or sound-gesture of the human mouth,
begin to function as mirrors reflecting us back upon ourselves. They
thus establish a new reflexivity between the human organism and
its own signs, short-circuiting the sensory reciprocity between that
organism and the land (the “reflective intellect” is precisely this
new reflexive loop, this new “reflection” between ourselves and our

188 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

written signs). Human encounters and events begin to become in-
teresting in their own right, independent of their relation to natural
cycles.

Recording mythic events in writing establishes, as well, a new ex-
perience of the permanence, fixity, and unrepeatable quality of those
events. Once fixed on the written surface, mythic events are no
longer able to shift their form to fit current situations. Current hap-
penings are thus robbed of their mythic, storied resonance; when the
myths are written down, contemporary events acquire a naked
specificity and uniqueness hitherto unknown. As some of these
naked occurrences come to be de-scribed or written down, they, too,
are thereby fixed in their particularity, and so assume their singular
place within the slowly accreting sequence of recorded events. Thus
does oral story gradually give way to written history. The cyclical
shape of earthly time gradually fades behind the new awareness of
an irreversible and rectilinear progression of itemizable events. And
historical, linear time becomes apparent.

But now let us step back for a moment. For by discussing in this
somewhat cursory manner the influence of alphabetic writing upon
the emergence of homogeneous “space” and linear “time,” I have
perhaps left the impression that space and time were always—for
oral peoples as for ourselves—distinguishable dimensions of experi-
ence, and that the literate revolution simply altered the experiential
character of these two, already distinct, phenomena. In truth, how-
ever, the very differentiation of “space” from “time” was itself born
of the same perceptual and linguistic changes that we are discussing.
For a time that is cyclical, or circular, is just as much spatial as it is
temporal.

The Indistinction of Space and Time in the Oral Universe

We touch here upon one of the most intransigent barriers prevent-
ing genuine understanding between the modern, alphabetized West
and indigenous, oral cultures. Unlike linear time, time conceived as

Time, Space, and the Eclipse of the Earth 189

cyclical cannot be readily abstracted from the spatial phenomena
that exemplify it—from, for instance, the circular trajectories of the
sun, the moon, and the stars. Unlike a straight line, moreover, a cir-
cle demarcates and encloses a spatial field. Indeed, the visible space
in which we commonly find ourselves when we step outdoors is itself
encompassed by the circular enigma that we have come to call “the
horizon.” The precise contour of the horizon varies considerably
in different terrains, yet whenever we climb to a prominent van-
tage point, the circular character of the visible world becomes ex-
plicit. Thus cyclical time, the experiential time of an oral culture,
has the same shape as perceivable space. And the two circles are, in
truth, one:

The Lakota define the year as a circle around the border of the
world. The circle is a symbol of both the earth (with its encircling
horizons) and time. The changes of sunup and sundown around
the horizon during the course of the year delineate the contours
of time, time as a part of space.’

On high plateaus in the Rocky Mountains, where the visible hori-
zon is especially vast and wide, are circular arrangements of stones
arrayed around a central hub. It is known that such “medicine
wheels,” still used by various North American tribes, once served a
calendrical function. Or, rather, they enabled a person to orient her-
self within a dimension that was neither purely spatial nor purely
temporal—the large stone that is precisely aligned with the place of
the sun’s northernmost emergence, marks a place that is as much in
time (the summer solstice) as in space. A similar unity—of that
which to us are two different dimensions, the spatial and the tempo-
ral—existed among the Aztecs at the time of the conquest, according
to Diego Duran, a Spanish monk who arrived in Mexico in the first
half of the sixteenth century:

Duran reports that among the Aztecs, who distribute their years
into cycles according to the cardinal points, “the years most
feared by the people were those of the North and of the West,
since they remembered that the most unhappy events had taken
place under those signs.”?

190 =©9°'THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

Soacyclical mode of time does not readily distinguish itself from
the spatial field in which oral persons find themselves experientially
immersed. We must remember, however, that this experiential space
is itself very different from the static, homogeneous void that alpha-
betic civilization has come to call “space.” As we saw above, space,
for an oral culture, is directly experienced as place, or as places—as a
differentiated realm containing diverse sites, each of which has its
own power, its own way of organizing our senses and influencing our
awareness. Unlike the abstraction of an infinite and homogeneous
“space,” place is from the first a qualitative matrix, a pulsing or po-
tentized field of experience, able to move us even in its stillness. It is
a mode of space, then, that is always already temporal, and we
should not be surprised that oral peoples speak of what to us are
purely spatial phenomena as animate, emergent processes, and of
space itself as a kind of dynamism, a continual unfolding. For in-
stance, a recent, book-length analysis of spatial concepts among the
Diné, or Navajo, concludes that for them

[s]pace, like the entities or objects within it, is dynamic. That is,
” “objects,” or similar units of action and perception
must be considered as units that are engaged in continuous
processes. In the same way, spatial units and spatial relation-
ships are “qualitative” in this same sense and cannot be consid-

ered to be clearly defined, readily quantifiable and static in
10

all “entities,

essence.

The authors assert, therefore, that a complex notion of space-time
(or, in their words, “time-space”) would likely be a more relevant
translation of Navajo experience “than clearly distinct concepts of
one-dimensional time and three-dimensional space.”!!

A similar situation was discovered by the American linguist Ben-
jamin Lee Whorf in his extensive analyses of the Hopi language
during the 1930s and early 1940s. Whorf found no analog, in the
Hopi language, to the linear, sequential, uniformly flowing time that
Western civilization takes for granted. Indeed, Whorf found no ref-
erence to any independent temporal dimension of reality, and no
terms or expressions that “refer to space in such a way as to exclude
that element of extension or existence that we call time, and so by

Time, Space, and the Eclipse of the Earth 191

implication leave a residue that could be referred to as time.”!* What
we call time, in other words, could not be isolated from the Hopi ex-
perience of space:

In this Hopi view, [that which we call] time disappears and [that
which we call] space is altered, so that it is no longer the homoge-
neous and instantaneous timeless space of our supposed intuition
or of classical Newtonian mechanics."

Whorf’s fascinating disclosures were often taken simplistically, by
researchers in other disciplines, to mean, among other things, that
the Hopi people have no temporal awareness whatsoever, or that the
Hopi language is utterly static, and has no way of distinguishing be-
tween earlier and later events, or between occurrences more or less
distant from the speaker in what we would call time. Such misread-
ings, doubtless encouraged by Whorf’s occasional propensity for
vigorous overstatement, have led various linguists in recent years to
decry Whorf’s findings. Several researchers, working closely with
the Hopi language, claim to have refuted Whorf’s conclusions en-
tirely.!+ Such refutations, however, are themselves dependent upon
an oversimplified reading of Whorf’s conclusions, upon a crusading
refusal to discern that Whorf was not asserting an absence of tem-
poral awareness among the Hopi, but rather an absence, in their dis-
course, of any metaphysical concept of time that could be isolated
from their dynamic awareness of spatiality.

While Whorf did not find separable notions of space and time
among the Hopi, he did discern, in the Hopi language, a distinction
between two basic modalities of existence, which he terms the
“manifested” and the “manifesting.” The “manifested” corresponds
roughly to our notion of “objective” existence, and it comprises “all
that is or has been accessible to the senses . . . with no attempt to dis-
tinguish between present and past, but excluding everything that we
call future.”!> The “manifesting,” on the other hand,

comprises all that we call future, but not merely this; it includes
equally and indistinguishably all that we call mental—everything
that appears or exists in the mind, or, as the Hopi would prefer to

192 ‘THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

say, in the heart, not only the heart of man, but the heart of ani-
mals, plants, and things, and behind and within all the forms and

appearances of nature, in the heart of nature [itself]... .'

The “manifested,” in other words, is that aspect of phenomena al-
ready evident to our senses, while the “manifesting” is that which is
not yet explicit, not yet present to the senses, but which is assumed
to be psychologically gathering itself toward manifestation within
the depths of all sensible phenomena. One’s own feeling, thinking,
and desiring are a part of, and hence participant with, this collective
desiring and preparing implicit in all things—from the emergence
and fruition of the corn, to the formation of clouds and the bestowal
of rain. Indeed, human intention, especially when concentrated by
communal ceremony and prayer, contributes directly to the becoming-
manifested of such phenomena.

5 a

WHILE THE LANGUAGE OF THE HOPI BELONGS TO THE UTO-
Aztecan family of languages, the neighboring Diné, or Navajo, speak
an Athapaskan language—like the Koyukon and other tribes of the
far Northwest, from whence the ancestors of the Apache and the
Navajo first headed south many centuries ago. (The nomadic Navajo
first came into contact with the Pueblo peoples of the Rio Grande
valley around six hundred years ago, and ultimately adopted a range
in the Arizona desert less than two hundred years ago.) Neverthe-
less, the Navajo language also seems to maintain a broad notion of
the influence of human desire and imagination upon a continually
emergent world, a notion very analogous to that found by Whorf
among the Hopi. In the 1983 study of Navajo semantics alluded to
earlier, the authors claim that “existence,” for the Navajo, “should
be understood as a continuous manifestation ...[as] a series of
events, rather than states or situational persistences through time.”!”
They then go on to suggest that what Western people call “the fu-
ture” is experienced by the Navajo to be

like a stock of possibilities, of incompletely realized events and
circumstances. They [these circumstances] are still most of all
‘becoming’ (rather than being) and involved in a process of ‘man-

Time, Space, and the Eclipse of the Earth 193

ifesting’ themselves. A human being can, through his thought
and desire, exert an influence on these ‘possibles.’!®

Thus, in place of any clear distinction between space and time, we
find, in examples of both the Uto-Aztecan and the Athapaskan lan-
guage groups, a subtle differentiation between manifest and unman-
ifest spatiality—that is, a sense of space as a continual emergence
from implicit to explicit existence, and of human intention as par-
ticipant with this encompassing emergence.

The indistinction of space and time was also evident in our dis-
cussion, in the last chapter, of Aboriginal Australian notions of the
Alcheringa, or Dreamtime. Like the Distant Time of the Koyukon,
the Dreamtime does not refer to the past in any literal sense (to a
time that is finished and done with), but rather to the temporal and
psychological latency of the enveloping landscape. Different paths
through the present terrain resonate with different stories from the
Dreamtime, and indeed every water hole, every forest, every cluster
of boulders or dry creekbed has its own Dreaming, its own implicit
life. The vitality of each place, moreover, is rejuvenated by the
human enactment, and en-chant-ment, of the storied events that
crouch within it. The Dreamtime, then, is integral to the spatial sur-
roundings. It is not a set of accomplished events located in some fin-
ished past, but is the very depth of the experiential present—the
earthly sleep, or dream, out of which the visible landscape continu-
ally comes to presence. And once again human dreaming, human in-
tention, human action and chanting participate vividly in this
coming-to-presence.

Numerous other examples could be cited. These few instances,
from opposite sides of the earth, should suffice at least to demon-
strate that separable “time” and “space” are not absolute givens in all
human experience. It is likely that without a formal system of nu-
merical and linguistic notation it is not possible to entirely abstract a
uniform sense of progressive “time” from the direct experience of
the animate, emergent environment—or, what amounts to the same
thing, to freeze the dynamic experience of earthly place into the in-
tuition of a static, homogeneous “space.” If this is the case, then
writing must be recognized as a necessary condition for the belief in
an entirely distinct space and time.

194 ‘THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

Exiled in the word

According to Mircea Eliade, the ancient Hebrews were the first peo-
ple to “discover” a linear, nonrepeating mode of time:

[F]or the first time, the prophets placed a value on history, suc-
ceeded in transcending the traditional vision of the cycle (the
conception that ensures all things will be repeated forever), and
discovered a one-way time. This discovery was not to be immedi-
ately and fully accepted by the consciousness of the entire Jewish
people, and the ancient conceptions were still long to survive.!?

To the ancient Hebrews, or what we know of them through the lens
of the Hebrew Bible, the cyclical return of seasonal events com-
manded far less attention than those happenings that were unique
and without precedent (natural catastrophes, sieges, battles, and the
like), for it was these nonrepeating events that signaled the will of
YHWH, or God, in relation to the Hebrew people. In Eliade’s
terms, these unique occurrences, whose consequences were often
devastating (either to the Hebrews or to their enemies), were inter-
preted by the prophets as “negative theophanies,” as expressions of
YHWH’s wrath. Thus interpreted, these discordant and nonrepeat-
ing events acquired a coherence previously unknown, and so began
to stand out from the cyclical unfolding of natural phenomena. And
the Hebrew nation came to comprehend itself in relation to this new,
nonrepeating modality of time—that is, in relation to history.

[F]Jor the first time, we find affirmed, and increasingly accepted,
the idea that historical events have a value in themselves, insofar
as they are determined by the will of God.”°

Yet it is crucial to recognize what Eliade does not mention in his
discussion—that the Hebrews are, as well, the first truly alphabetic
culture that we know of, the first “People of the Book.” Indeed, at
the founding event of the Jewish nation—the great theophany atop
Mount Sinai—Moses inscribes the commandments dictated by

Time, Space, and the Eclipse of the Earth 195.

YHWH (the most sacred of God’s names) upon two stone tablets,
presumably in an alphabetic script.2! (Contemporary scholars place
the exodus from Egypt sometime around 1250 B.C.E.; it is just at this
time that the twenty-two-letter, consonantal aleph-beth was coming
into use in the area of Canaan, or Palestine.)

In truth, the new recognition of anonmythological, nonrepeating
time by the Hebrew scribes can only be comprehended with refer-
ence to alphabetic writing itself. Recording cultural stories in writ-
ing, as we have seen, fixes the storied events in their particularity,
providing them with a new and unchanging permanence while in-
scribing them in a steadily accreting sequence of similarly unique
occurrences. A new sense of time as a nonrepeating sequence begins
to make itself felt over and against the ceaseless cycling of the cos-
mos. The variously scribed layers of the Hebrew Bible are the first
sustained record of this new sensibility.

As we have also discerned, the ancient aleph-beth, as the first
thoroughly phonetic writing system, prioritized the human voice.
The increasingly literate Israelites found themselves caught up in a
vital relationship not with the expressive natural forms around
them, nor with the static images or idols common to pictographic or
ideographic cultures, but with an all-powerful human voice. It was a
voice that clearly preceded, and outlasted, every individual life—the
voice, it would seem, of eternity itself—but which nevertheless ad-
dressed the Hebrew nation directly, speaking, first and foremost,
through the written letters.

While the visible landscape provides an oral, tribal culture with a
necessary mnemonic, or memory trigger, for remembering its ances-
tral stories, alphabetic writing enabled the Hebrewtribes to preserve
their cultural stories intact even when the people were cut off, for
many generations, from the actual lands where those stories had
taken place. By carrying on its lettered surface the vital stories ear-
lier carried by the terrain itself, the written text became a kind of
portable homeland for the Hebrew people. And indeed it is only thus,
by virtue of this portable ground, that the Jewish people have been
able to preserve their singular culture, and thus themselves, while in
an almost perpetual state of exile from the actual lands where their
ancestral stories unfolded.

Yet many of the written narratives in the Bible are already stories

196 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

of displacement, of exile. The most ancient stratum of the Hebrew
Bible is structured, from the first, by the motif of exile—from the
expulsion of Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden, to the long
wandering of the Israelites in the desert. The Jewish sense of exile
was never merely a state of separation from a specific locale, from a
particular ground; it was (and is) also a sense of separation from the
very possibility of being placed, from the very possibility of being
entirely at home. This deeper sense of displacement, this sense of
always already being in exile, is inseparable, I suggest, from alpha-
betic literacy, this great and difficult magic of which the Hebrews
were the first real caretakers. Alphabetic writing can engage the
human senses only to the extent that those senses sever, at least pro-
visionally, their spontaneous participation with the animate earth.
To begin to read, alphabetically, is thus already to be dis-placed, cut
off from the sensory nourishment of a more-than-human field of
forms. It is also, however, to feel the still-lingering savor of that
nourishment, and so to yearn, to hope, that such contact and con-
viviality may someday return. “Because being Jewish,” as Edmond
Jabes has written, “means exiling yourself in the word and, at the same
time, weeping for your exile.”?*

The pain, the sadness of this exile, is precisely the trace of what
has been lost, the intimation of a forgotten intimacy. The narratives
in Genesis remain deeply attuned to the animistic power of places,
and it is this lingering power that lends such poignancy to the mo-
tifs of exodus and exile. The stories of the patriarchs are filled with
sacred place-names, and many of these narratives seem structured so
as to tell how particular places came to have their specific names,
While these sacred sites never seem to have an entirely autonomous
power (many, for instance, take their sacredness from the fact that
YHWH there speaks or otherwise reveals Himself to one of the pro-
tagonists), earthly place nevertheless remains a structuring element
of biblical space.

Moreover, the trajectory of time, for the ancient Hebrews, was by
no means entirely linear. The holy days described in the Bible are
closely bound to the intertwined cycles of the sun and the moon.
Further, the nonrepeating, historical time alluded to by Eliade seems
to correlate with the sense of existential separation and exile. It is
thus that, in Hebrew tradition, the expulsion from the eternity of

Time, Space, and the Eclipse of the Earth 197

Eden (and, later, the destruction of the Temple) is mirrored, at the
other end of sequential history, by the promised return from exile,
the coming of the Messiah, and an end to separated time. The for-
ward trajectory of time, that is, will at last open outward, flowing
back into the spacious eternity of living place (the “promised land”),
and so into a golden age of peace between all nations. Eternity lies
not in a separated heaven (the ancient Hebrews knew of no such
realm) but in the promise of a future reconciliation on the earth.

Time and space are still profoundly influenced by one another in
the Hebrew Bible. They are never entirely distinguishable, for they
are still informed, however distantly, by a participatory experience
of place.

IT REMAINED FOR THE ANCIENT GREEKS, POSSESSED OF THEIR OWN
version of the alphabet, to derive an entirely placeless notion of eter-
nity—a strictly intelligible, nonmaterial realm of pure Ideas resting
entirely outside of the sensible world. It is obvious that the Greek al-
phabet contributed to a kind of theoretical abstraction very different
from that engaged in by the Hebrew prophets and scribes. In part,
this may be attributed to the very different historical trajectories of
the Hebrew and the Greek peoples, to the obvious contrasts between
desert-dwelling peoples and seafaring peoples, and to a host of other
influences upon Greek culture arriving, like the alphabet, from
abroad. But it is also the consequence of a simple but profound
structural change introduced into the alphabet by the Greek scribes
when they adapted this writing system from its earlier, Semitic in-
carnation. We must leave to the next chapter a careful discussion of
this structural change and its experiential ramifications. Here we
need only observe that Greek thinkers were the first to begin to ob-
jectify space and time as entirely distinct and separable dimensions.

Yet this was a sporadic and fragmentary process, resulting from
the overlapping descriptive, analytic, and speculative writings of di-
verse individuals and schools of thought. The earliest historians,
like Hecataeus of Miletos (c. 550-489 B.c.E.), Herodotus (c. 480-425
B.C.E.), and Thucydides (c. 460-400 B.C.E.) pioneered the use of
written prose, rather than poetry, to record past events, They prac-
ticed a new skepticism regarding the storied gods and goddesses

198 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

of the animate environment, and by separating past events from the
tradition-bound rhythms of verse and chanted story, they loosened
time itself from the recurrent cycling of the sensuous earth, open-
ing the prospect of a nonrepeating, historical time extending indefi-
nitely into the past.

A century later Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E.) sought to define the di-
mension of time as it makes itself evident in our experience. He con-
cluded that “time is just this: the number of a motion with respect to
the prior and the posterior.””?
counted whenever we measure a movement between earlier and later

Time, in other words, is what is

moments of its unfolding. Time is thus inseparable from number
and sequence; it appears in Aristotle’s writings as a continuous lin-
ear series of points, each a punctiform “now” dividing the past from
the future.

Shortly thereafter, in his remarkably influential text Elements, the
Greek geometrician Euclid (c. 300 B.C.E.) implied by his various def-
initions and postulates that space itself could be conceived as an en-
tirely homogeneous and limitless three-dimensional continuum.
The homogeneous character of Euclidian space was indicated, in
particular, by his assertion that parallel straight lines, no matter
how far they are extended in either direction, will never meet. While
this postulate holds true for a perfectly flat and featureless ideal
space, the experienced world that we bodily inhabit is not so regular.
Indeed, we now know that the sphericality of the earth itself—
this very surface on which we dwell—confounds Euclid’s parallel
postulate: two straightest-possible lines that start out parallel to
each other on the curved surface of a sphere will eventually converge
and cross, like meridians at the North Pole. That we still commonly
envision the curved surface of the earth, with all of its local irregu-
larities (its mountains and river valleys), to be embedded within
a three-dimensional space lacking any curvature of its own, is ex-
quisite testimony to the lasting influence of Euclidean conceptions.
Euclid’s assumptions provided the classical basis for Western,
scientific notions of space, from the Renaissance until the work of
Albert Einstein, and even today our supposedly “commonsense” ex-
perience remains profoundly under the influence of such assump-
tions.

While evolving techniques of numerical notation and measure-

Time, Space, and the Eclipse of the Earth 199

ment obviously played an explicit role in the development of these
early descriptions, the spread of alphabetic literacy was at work be-
hind the scenes, altering the perceptual relations between the Greeks
and the sensible world around them, and thus gradually disclosing
the new, apparently independent dimensions of space and time to
which the numbers and measurements were then applied.

Absolute Space and Absolute Time

Yet a thorough description of homogeneous “space” and sequential
“time,” as objectively existing entities, had to wait until the inven-
tion of the printing press. For it was the dissemination of printed
texts (texts that until then had been meticulously copied by hand
and preserved, like treasures, in monastic libraries and universities)
into the wider community of persons, and the subsequent rise of
vernacular literatures, that effectively sealed the ascendancy of al-
phabetic modes of thought over the oral, participatory experience of
nature. The thorough differentiation of “time” from “space” was
impossible as long as large portions of the community still experi-
enced the surrounding terrain as animate and alive, as long as mate-
rial (spatial) phenomena were still perceived by many as having their
own inherent spontaneity and (temporal) dynamism.** The burning
alive of tens of thousands of women (most of them herbalists and
midwives from peasant backgrounds) as “witches” during the six-
teenth and seventeenth centuries may usefully be understood as the
attempted, and nearly successful, extermination of the last orally
preserved traditions of Europe—the last traditions rooted in the di-
rect, participatory experience of plants, animals, and elements—in
order to clear the way for the dominion of alphabetic reason over a
natural world increasingly construed as a passive and mechanical set
of objects.

It was Isaac Newton, in his great Principia Mathematica of 1687,
who finally gave an absolute formulation to separable “time” and
“space” as the necessary frame for his clockwork universe:

200 ‘THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

Absolute, true and mathematical time, of itself and from its own
nature, flows equably without regard to anything external. ...

Absolute space, in its own nature, without regard to anything ex-

ternal, remains always similar and immovable. . . .?°

By these formulations Newton meant to distinguish “absolute time”
from that “relative time” which is simply the order of succession of
perceivable events, and to distinguish “absolute space” from that
“relative space” which is the order of coexistence between perceiv-
able things.*° While “relative time” is merely a relationship between
material events, and so has no existence apart from those events,
“absolute, true and mathematical time” is, for Newton, an indepen-
dent reality that we cannot perceive directly, but which underlies all
material events and their relations. Similarly “absolute, true, and
mathematical space” subsists independent of all perceivable things.
In itself it is empty—a void. Like absolute time, it is infinite in ex-
tent; it can neither be created nor destroyed, and no part of it can be
distinguished from any other part.

‘

By assuming the existence of this empty and “immovable”
space—this space that is at rest relative to any and all motion—New-
ton was then able to calculate the motion of the moon or the earth
relative to this absolute space; it was only by assuming these absolute
references that he was able to derive his theory of universal attrac-
tion, or “gravity.” After the publication of his Principia, Newton’s
assumptions regarding space and time were challenged by numerous
philosophers, and he found himself in extended debates with such
illustrious thinkers as Leibniz and Berkeley over the question of
whether one could rationally distinguish absolute from relative
space, or absolute from relative time.”” However, although they chal-
lenged the absolute character of Newton’s space and time, none of
these thinkers challenged the assumption of an absolute difference
between space and time—the by now commonplace assumption that
space and time were entirely distinct dimensions of experience.

In 1781, Immanuel Kant, in his Critique of Pure Reason, capped
the debates regarding the absolute or relative nature of time and
space. He agreed with Newton that space and time were absolute,
that they were independent of particular things and events. For

Time, Space, and the Eclipse of the Earth 201

Kant, however, these distinct dimensions did not belong to the sur-
rounding world as it exists in itself, but were necessary forms of
human awareness, the two forms by which the human mind in-
evitably structures the things it perceives. Thus, while he denied
that space and time necessarily exist apart from human experience,
Kant’s work seemed to establish more forcefully than ever that, at
least as far as humans were concerned, “space” and “time” were dis-
tinct and inescapable dimensions.

Needless to say, Kant’s writings could not be translated into
Navajo or Pintupi.

PART II: THE LIVING PRESENT

When I returned to North America from my travels among tra-
ditional peoples in Indonesia and Nepal, I quickly found myself
perplexed and confused by many aspects of my own culture. As-
sumptions that I had previously taken for granted, or that I had
since childhood accepted as obvious and unshakable truths, now
made little sense to me. The belief, for instance, in an autonomous
“past” and “future.” Where were these invisible realms that had so
much power over the lives of my family and friends? Everybody that
I knew seemed to be expending a great deal of effort thinking about
and trying to hold onto the past—obsessively photographing and
videotaping events, and continually projecting and fretting about the
future—ceaselessly sending out insurance premiums for their
homes, for their cars, even for their own bodies. As a result of all
these past and future concerns, everyone appeared (to me in my raw
and newly returned state) to be strangely unaware of happenings
unfolding all around them 17 the present. They seemed utterly obliv-
ious to all those phenomena to which I had had to sensitize myself in
order to communicate with indigenous magicians in the course of
my fieldwork: the lives of other animals, the minute gestures of in-
sects and plants, the speech of birds, the tastes in the wind, the flux
of sounds and smells. ... My family and my old friends all seemed
so oblivious to the sensuous presence of the world. The present, for

202 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

them, seemed nothing more than a point, an infinitesimal now sepa-
rating “the past” from “the future.” And indeed, the more I entered
into conversation with my family and friends, the more readily I,
too, felt my consciousness cut off, as though by a sheet of reflective
glass, from the life of the land....

There is a useful exercise that I devised back then to keep myself
from falling completely into the civilized oblivion of linear time.
You are welcome to try it the next time you are out of doors. I locate
myself in a relatively open space—a low hill is particularly good, or
a wide field. I relax a bit, take a few breaths, gaze around. Then I
close my eyes, and let myself begin to feel the whole bulk of my
past—the whole mass of events leading up to this very moment.
And I call into awareness, as well, my whole future—all those pro-
jects and possibilities that lie waiting to be realized. I imagine this
past and this future as two vast balloons of time, separated from
each other like the bulbs of an hourglass, yet linked together at the
single moment where I stand pondering them. And then, very
slowly, I allow both of these immense bulbs of time to begin leaking
their substance into this minute moment between them, into the
present. Slowly, imperceptibly at first, the present moment begins to
grow. Nourished by the leakage from the past and the future, the
present moment swells in proportion as those other dimensions
shrink. Soon it is very large; and the past and future have dwindled
down to mere knots on the edge of this huge expanse. At this point
I let the past and the future dissolve entirely. And I open my
eyes....

I FIND MYSELF STANDING IN THE MIDST OF AN ETERNITY, A VAST
and inexhaustible present. The whole world rests within itself—the trees
at the field’s edge, the hum of crickets in the grass, cirrocumulus clouds
rippling like waves across the sky, from horizon to horizon. In the dis-
tance I notice the curving dirt road and my rusty car parked at its
edge—these, too, seem to have their place in this open moment of vision,
this eternal present. And smells—the air is rich with faint whiffs from
the forest, the heather, the soil underfoot—so many messages mingling
between different elements in the encircling land. The jagged snag of a
single withered oak tree standing alone in the field does not, 1n this eter-

Time, Space, and the Eclipse of the Earth 203

nity, seem really dead. It 1s surrounded by an admiring clump of low
bushes, and a large boulder reposes at the edge of these bushes, dialoguing
with the old tree about shadows and sunlight.

Stepping closer, I see that the crumbling bark around the oak’s trunk
is crossed by two lines of ants, one moving up the trunk and the other
heading down into the soil. From this closer vantage I see, too, that the
shadows on the boulder are not really shadows at all, but patches of
lichen spreading outward from various points on the rock’s surface, in di-
verse textures and hues—dull blacks and crinkly grays and powdery,
deep reds—as though through them the rock was expressing its inner
moods. I scratch my leg. Strangely, the vividness of this world does not
dissipate. I stomp on the ground, spin around, even stand on my head.
But the open present does not disperse. Several jet black crows race out
of the woods, chasing each other in swoops and sudden dives; one of them
lands on the crumbling snag. “Kahhr!... Kahr! Kahr!” Now it glides
down to the ground just in front of me—“Kahr!”—and stands there
looking at me, sideways, through a purple eye. The lids blink swiftly, like
shutters. It hops around me and the big beak opens. “Kawhhr!” I try to
reply, “Cawr!” and the bird steps forward. Crow does not hop, I see, but
walks, clumsily, on this ground. I can see the tiny feathers covering the
nostrils on its beak as the breeze picks it up off the ground, feel myself
swoop through the swirling breeze toward the forest edge... .

Things are different in this world without “the past” and “the fu-
ture,” my body quivering in this space like an animal. I know well that,
in some time out of this time, I must return to my house and my books.
But here, too, is home. For my body is at home, in this open present, with
its mind. And this is no mere illusion, no hallucination, this etermty—
there 1s something too persistent, too stable, too unshakable about this ex-
perience for 1t to be merely a mirage. ...

THE UNSHAKABLE SOLIDITY OF THIS EXPERIENCE IS CURIOUS
indeed. It seems to have something to do with the remarkable affin-
ity between this temporal notion that we term “the present” and the
spatial landscape in which we are embedded. When I allow the past
and the future to dissolve, imaginatively, into the immediacy of the
present moment, then the “present” itself expands to become an en-
veloping field of presence. And this presence, vibrant and alive, spon-

204 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

taneously assumes the precise shape and contour of the enveloping
sensory landscape, as though this were its native shape! It is this re-
markable fit between temporal concept (the “present”) and spatial
percept (the enveloping presence of the land) that accounts, I be-
lieve, for the relatively stable and solid nature of this experience, and
that prompts me to wonder whether “time” and “space” are really as
distinct as I was taught to believe. There is no aspect of this realm
that is strictly temporal—for it is composed of spatial things that
have density and weight, and is spatially extended around me on all
sides, from the near trees to the distant clouds. And yet there is no
aspect, either, that is strictly spatial or static—for every perceivable
being, from the stones to the breeze to my car in the distance, seems
to vibrate with life and sensation. In this open present, I am unable
to isolate space from time, or vice versa. I am immersed in the world.

IN 1905, ALBERT EINSTEIN CHALLENGED THE NEWTONIAN VIEW OF
absolute time and absolute space with his “special theory of relativ-
ity.” Einstein’s equations in this, and later in the “general theory of
relativity,” did not treat of time and space; they assumed, instead,
the existence of a unitary continuum that Einstein termed “space-
time.” Space-time, however, was a highly abstract concept un-
thinkable apart from the complex mathematics of relativity theory.
Einstein’s mathematical revelations, in other words, did little to
challenge the Kantian assumption that separable space and time
were necessary and unavoidable forms in all ordinary perception.
While space-time held sway within the conceptual order of relativity
physics, our direct, perceptual experience was still assumed to be
structured according to the separable dimensions of time and space.

It thus fell to the tradition of phenomenology to call into ques-
tion the distinction between space and time at the level of our direct,
preconceptual experience. Of course, phenomenology did not set
out to undermine this distinction—only to attend, as closely as pos-
sible, to the way phenomena present themselves in our immediate,
lived experience. Indeed, phenomenologists tended to assume, at the
outset, a clear distinction between space and time. It was only
toward the end of his investigations regarding the phenomenology
of “time consciousness” that Edmund Husserl was led to suggest

Time, Space, and the Eclipse of the Earth 205

that the experience of time is rooted in a deeper dimension of expe-
rience that is not, in itself, strictly temporal.”8

Husserl’s assistant, the German phenomenologist Martin Hei-
degger, returned again and again to the analysis of temporal ex-
perience. In his massive and influential work Being and Time,
Heidegger disclosed, underneath the commonplace Aristotelian idea
of time as an infinite sequence of “now points,” a forgotten sense of
time as the very mystery of Being, as that strange power—essentially
resistant to all objectification or representation—that nevertheless
structures and makes possible all our relations to each other and to
the world. This mystery cannot be represented, precisely because it
is never identical to itself; primordial time, for Heidegger, is from
the first outside-of-itself, or “ecstatic.” Indeed, the past, the present,
and the future are here described by Heidegger as the three “ec-
stasies” of time, the three ways in which the irreducible dynamism
of existence opens us to what is outside ourselves, to that which is
other?

Yet Heidegger gradually came to suspect that this implicit, pre-
conceptual sense of time could not be held apart from our precon-
ceptual experience of space. Hence, in an important essay written
late in his career, Heidegger alludes to a still more primordial di-
mension, which he calls “time-space”—a realm neither wholly tem-
poral nor wholly spatial, from whence “time” and “space” have been
artificially derived by a process of abstraction.*”

Meanwhile, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, continually deepening his
own investigations of perceptual experience, also came, in his final
work, to assert an experiential realm more originary than space and
time, from which these two dimensions have been derived. In the
working notes to The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty writes
of “this very time that is space, this very space that is time, which I
will have rediscovered by my analysis of the visible and the flesh.”?!
Yet this analysis was cut short by his sudden death in 1961.

So all three phenomenologists—Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-
Ponty—came independently, in the course of their separate investi-
gations, to suspect that the conventional distinction between space
and time was untenable from the standpoint of direct, preconceptual
experience. Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty were both striving,
toward the end of their lives, to articulate a more immediate modal-

206 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

ity of awareness, a more primordial dimension whose characteristics
are neither strictly spatial nor strictly temporal, but are rather—
somehow—both at once.

We have seen that such a mode of experience is commonplace for
indigenous, oral peoples, for whom time and space have never been
sundered. The tradition of phenomenology, it would seem, has been
striving to recover such an experience from within literate awareness
itself—straining to remember, in the very depths of reflective
thought, the silent reciprocity wherein such reflection is born. No
single one of these thinkers was entirely successful in reconciling
time and space. Yet their later writings provide tantalizing clues, tal-
ismans for those who are struggling today to bring their minds and
their bodies back together, and so to regain a full-blooded awareness
of the present.

The Earthly Topology of Time

I remain standing on this hill under nppled clouds, my skin tingling with
sensations. The expansiveness of the present holds my body enthralled.
My animal senses are all awake—my ears attuned to a multiplicity of
minute sounds, the tiny hairs on my face registering every lull and shift
in the breeze. I am embedded in this open moment, my muscles stretching
and bending with the grass. This present seems endless, inexhaustible.
What, then, has become of the past and the future?

I found my way into this living expanse by dissolving past and fu-
ture into the sensorial present that envelops me; did I thereby do
away with them entirely? I think not. I simply did away with these
dimensions as they are conventionally conceived—as autonomous
realms existing apart from the sensuous present. By letting past and
future dissolve into the present moment, I have opened the way for
their gradual rediscovery—no longer as autonomous, mental realms,
but now as aspects of the corporeal present, of this capacious terrain
that bodily enfolds me. And so now I crouch in the midst of this
eternity, my naked toes hugging the soil and my eyes drinking the

Time, Space, and the Eclipse of the Earth 207

distances, trying to discern where, in this living landscape, the past
and the future might reside.

Merleau-Ponty, in one of the notes found on his desk after his
death, addressed the same conundrum:

In what sense the visible landscape under my eyes is not exterior
to... other moments of time and the past, but has them really
behind itself in simultaneity, inside itself, and not it and they side
by side “in” time.*?

And so we are faced with this puzzle: Where, within the visible land-
scape, can we locate the past and the future? Where is their place in
the sensuous world?

Of course, we may say that we perceive the past all around us, in
great trees grown from seeds that germinated long ago, in the eroded
banks of a meandering stream, or the widening cracks in an old road.
And, too, that we are peering into the future wherever we look—
watching a storm cloud emerge from the horizon, or a spiderweb
slowly taking shape before our eyes—since all that we perceive is al-
ready, in a sense, pregnant with the future. But how, then, can we
distinguish these two temporal realms? We certainly havea sense that
the past and the future are not the same; nevertheless, they are
strangely commingled within all that we perceive. How, then, do
they distinguish themselves perceptually? If we say that “the past”
is where all that we see comes from and “the future” is where it is all
going, we simply beg the question, naming two allegedly obvious
domains that we remain unable to locate within the perceivable land-
scape—as though past and future are, indeed, pure intuitions of the
mind, existing in some incorporeal dimension outside of the sensory
world. This, presumably, is what prompts many scientists and
philosophers to assert that other animals have no real awareness of
time—no sense of a past or a future—since they lack any intellect
that could apprehend this non-sensuous dimension.

As an animal myself, I remain suspicious of all these dodges, all
these ways whereby my species lays claim to a source of truth that
supposedly lies outside of the bodily world wherein plants, stones,
and streams have their being, outside of this earthly terrain that we
share with the other animals. And yet, as a philosopher, I feel

208 ‘THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

pressed to account for these mysteries, for these “times” that are
somehow not present, for these other “whens.” And so now let us bring
the human animal and the philosopher in ourselves together, and try
to locate the “past” and the “future” within the sensory landscape.

FIRST, WE SHOULD TAKE SOME METHODOLOGICAL GUIDANCE FROM
Merleau-Ponty, who in 1960 was already struggling to give voice to
“this very time that is space, this very space that is time.”*? In his last
work Merleau-Ponty describes the relation between the perceptual
world and the world of our supposedly incorporeal ideals and
thoughts: “it is by borrowing from the world’s structure that the
universe of truth and of thought is constructed for us.”3+ These
words assert the primacy of the bodily world relative to the universe
of ideas; they suggest that the structures of our apparently incorpo-
real ideas are lifted, as it were, from the structures of the perceptual
world. If we read Merleau-Ponty’s words carefully, and accept their
guidance, we discern that what we are here hunting for, in our deep-
ening quest, are specific aspects of the perceivable landscape that
have lent their particular character, or shape, to these two persistent
ideas, “the past” and “the future.” We are searching, that is, for a
structural correspondence—an isomorphism, or match—between
the conceptual structure of “the past” and “the future” and the per-
ceptual structure of the surrounding sensory world.

If we have taken a kind of method from Merleau-Ponty, it is to
Martin Heidegger that we should turn for a careful structural de-
scription of “the past” and “the future.” Throughout his life, from
his first to his final writings, Heidegger gave special attention to the
phenomenon of time, and it is he, more than any other thinker, who
developed a phenomenology of time’s dimensions. In the middle of
a late essay entitled “Time and Being,” Heidegger asks the very
question we ourselves have posed: “Where is time? /s time at all and
does it have a place?”?> He then goes on to distinguish that time into
which he is inquiring from the common ?7dea of time as a linear se-
quence of “nows”:

Obviously, time is not nothing. Accordingly, we maintain caution
and say: there is time. We become still more cautious, and look

Time, Space, and the Eclipse of the Earth 209

carefully at that which shows itself as time, by looking ahead to
Being in the sense of presence, the present. However, the present
in the sense of presence differs so vastly from the present in the
sense of the now... . [T]he present as presence and everything
which belongs to such a present would have to be called real time,
even though there is nothing immediately about it of time as time
is usually represented in the sense of a succession of a calculable

sequence of nows.*6

Heidegger’s philosophical move, here, to disclose behind the present
considered as “now” a deeper sense of the present as “presence,” ap-
proximates our own experiential move to expand the punctiform
“now” by dissolving the “past” and the “future” as conventionally
experienced, thereby locating ourselves in a vast and open present—
which we, too, have called “the present as presence.” According to
Heidegger, it is only from within this experience of the present as
presence that “real time” (which, later in the essay, he will call
“time-space”) can begin to make itself evident. In our case the pres-
ent has determined itself as presence only by taking on the precise
contours of the visible landscape that enfolds us. We are now free to
look around us, in this vast terrain, for the place of the past and of
the future.

And Heidegger offers us a helpful clue. In Being and Time, he
writes of past, present, and future as the three “ecstasies” of time,
suggesting that the past, the present, and the future all draw us
outside of ourselves. Time is ecstatic in that it opens us outward.
Toward what? The three ecstasies of time, according to Heidegger,
“are not simply raptures in which one gets carried away. Rather,
there belongs to each ecstasy a ‘whither’ to which one is carried... .”
Each of time’s ecstasies carries us, Heidegger says, toward a partic-
ular “horizon. ”37

As soon as we pay heed to this curious description, we notice an
obvious correspondence between the conceptual structure of time,
as described by Heidegger, and the perceptual structure of the en-
veloping landscape. The horizon itself! Heidegger uses the term
“horizon” as a structural metaphor, a way of expressing the ecstatic
nature of time. Just as the power of time seems to ensure that the
perceivable present is always open, always already unfolding beyond

210 "THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

itself, so the distant horizon seems to hold open the perceivable land-
scape, binding it always to that which lies beyond it.*8

The visible horizon, that is, a kind of gateway or threshold, join-
ing the presence of the surrounding terrain to that which exceeds
this open presence, to that which is hidden beyond the horizon. The
horizon carries the promise of something more, something other.
Here we have made our first discovery: the way that other places—
places not explicitly present within the perceivable landscape—are
nevertheless joined to the present landscape by the visible horizon.
And so let us ask: is it possible that the realms we are looking for,
the place of the past and that of the future, are precisely beyond the
horizon?

Certainly this is a useful first step. For clearly, neither the past
nor the future are entirely out in the open of the perceivable present,
and yet they seem everywhere implied. Since the horizon effectively
implicates all that lies beyond the horizon within the present land-
scape that it bounds, it seems plausible to suppose that both the past
and the future reside beyond the horizon.

Yet this leaves me somewhat confused, for I am unable, then, to
account for the difference between the past and the future. The hori-
zon of the perceivable landscape is provided, I know, by the relation
of my body to the vast and spherical Body of the earth. This is not
merely something that I have read, or learned in school, It has be-
come evident and true for me in the course of many journeys across
the land, watching the horizon continually recede as I move toward
it, watching it disgorge unexpected vistas that expand and envelop
me even as the horizon itself maintains its distance. And yet if I
glance behind me as I journey, I see that this enigmatic edge is also
following me, keeping its distance behind me as well as in front,
gradually swallowing those terrains that I walk, drive, or pedal away
from. May I then conclude that the future is beyond that part of the
horizon toward which I am facing, while the past is beyond that part
of the horizon that lies behind me? Then I would need only to turn
around in order for my past to become my future, and vice versa. But
this does not seem quite right. If I journey toward the horizon—
toward any part of that horizon—I will indeed disclose new things
and places that were previously in my future, beyond the horizon.
Certainly I can attempt the reverse, as when I journey back toward

Time, Space, and the Eclipse of the Earth 211

that distant town where I used to dwell. But in this I am never quite
successful. For that town, when I arrive, is no longer as it was. The
old schoolhouse now stands half-collapsed in a field overgrown with
wildflowers and thistles; the marsh where each spring I used to await
the arrival of herons has vanished beneath a huge shopping mall... .
The land has changed. I cannot, it seems, journey toward the past
in the same way that I can journey toward the future. For the past
does not remain past beyond the horizon; it does not wait for me
there like the future.

It is this strange asymmetry of past and future in relation to the
present that Heidegger describes in his late essay “Time and Being.”
While in Being and Time Heidegger wrote of the centrifugal, ecstatic
character of time—of time as that which draws us outside of our-
selves, opening us to what is other—in this later essay he stresses the
centripetal, inward-extending nature of time, describing time as a
mystery that continually approaches us from beyond, extending
and offering the gift of presence while nevertheless withdrawing
behind the event of this offering. Such descriptions may sound
strange, even uncanny, to our ears, and yet we should listen to
them closely. For as Heidegger’s thought matured, he increasingly
sought to loosen human awareness from the bondage of outworn as-
sumptions, precisely by wielding common words in highly unusual
ways, shaking terms free from their conventional usages. Thus past
and future are here articulated as hidden powers that approach us,
offering and opening the present while nevertheless remaining
withdrawn, concealed from the very present that they make possible.
In Heidegger’s description, both the past and the future remain
hidden from the open presence that they mutually bring about.*?
And yet the way the future conceals itself in its offering is quite dif-
ferent from the manner in which the past is concealed in its giving.
Specifically, the future, or that which is to come, withholds its pres-
ence, while the past, or that which has been, refuses its presence.”
The future withholds, while the past refuses. In his most complete
description of the vicissitudes of time, Heidegger puts the matter
thus:

What has been, which, by refusing the present, lets that become
present which is no longer present; and the coming toward us of

212 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

what is to come, which, by withholding the present, lets that be
present which is not yet present—both [make] manifest the
manner of an extending opening up which gives all presencing
into the open.*!

The strange character of Heidegger’s language here is part of his
project: he is trying to avoid the use of nouns, of nominative forms
that would freeze the temporal flux. It is precisely this strange-
ness that enables his words to approach, and to open us onto, the
silent structuration of this mystery we call time. If we ponder these
words from within the open presence of the land around us, we are
led to ask: Where can we perceive this withholding and this refusal of
which Heidegger speaks? Where can we glimpse this refusal and this
withholding that open and make possible the sensuous presence of
the world around us?

We have already noticed the magic by which the horizon encloses
and yet holds open the visible landscape: precisely by concealing, or
better, withholding, that which lies beyond it. Thus, the horizon may
indeed be felt as a withholding. But it is hardly a refusal. The hori-
zon’s lips of earth and sky may touch one another, but they are never
sealed; and we know that if we journey toward that horizon, it will
gradually disclose to us that which it now withholds.

Where, then, can we locate the refusal to which Heidegger al-
ludes? Do we perceive such a refusal anywhere around us? More im-
portant: how do we even know what we are looking for? Here again,
Heidegger provides a clue. In “Time and Being,” he writes of the
past and of the future as absences that by their very absence concern
us, and so make themselves felt within the present.*? This descrip-
tion aids us a great deal. Now at least we can say what we are search-
ing for in our attempt to locate, or place, the past and the future. We
are hunting for modes of absence which, by their very way of being
absent, make themselves felt within the sensuous presence of the
open landscape. Or in Merleau-Ponty’s terminology (the terminol-
ogy of The Visible and the Invisible) we could say we are searching for
certain invisible aspects of the visible environment, certain unseen
regions whose very hiddenness somehow enables or makes possible
the open visibility of the land around us. The beyond-the-horizon is
just such an absent or unseen realm.

Time, Space, and the Eclipse of the Earth 213

And so we must now ask: Is there another unseen aspect, another
absent region whose very concealment is somehow necessary to the
open presence of the landscape?

Of course, there are those facets that I cannot see of the things or
bodies that surround me—the sides of the trees that are facing away
from me, or the other side of that lichen-covered rock. Yet these
concealments are all analogous, in a sense, to that which lies hidden
beyond the horizon. The other side of that rock, for instance, is
withheld from my gaze, but it is not refused, for I can disclose it by
walking over there, just as I can disclose what lies beyond the hori-
zon by making a longer journey.

What of my own body? Well, most of my body is present to my
awareness, and visible to my gaze. I can see my limbs, my torso, and
even my nose, although my back, of course, is hidden beyond the
horizon of my shoulders. The back of my body is inaccessible to my
vision, and yet I know that it exists, that it is visible to the crows
perched behind me in the trees, as I know that the fields and forests
hidden beyond the horizon are yet visible and present to those who
dwell there.

Yet while pondering the unseen aspect of my body, I soon notice
another unseen region: that of the whole inside of my body. The in-
side of my body is not, of course, entirely absent; but it is hidden
from visibility in a manner very different from the concealment of
my back, or of that which lies beyond the horizon. It is an instance,
I suddenly realize, of a vast mode of absence or invisibility entirely
proper to the present landscape—an absence I had almost entirely
forgotten. It is the absence of what is under the ground.

LIKE THE BEYOND-THE-HORIZON, THE ABSENCE OF THE UNDER-
the-ground is an absence so familiar, and so necessary to the open
presence of the world around us, that we take it entirely for granted,
and so it has been very difficult for me to bring it into awareness. But
once I have done so, the recognition of this hidden realm begins to
clarify and balance the enigmatic power of that other unseen region
beyond the horizon.

For these would seem to be the two primary dimensions from
whence things enter the open presence of the landscape, and into

214 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

which they depart. Sensible phenomena are continually appearing
out of, and continually vanishing into, these two very different
realms of concealment or invisibility. One trajectory is a passage out
toward, or inward from, a vast openness. The other is a descent into,
or a sprouting up from, a packed density. While the open horizon
withholds the visibility of that which lies beyond it, the ground is
much more resolute in its concealment of what lies beneath it. It is
this resoluteness, this refusal of access to what lies beneath the
ground, that enables the ground to solidly support all those phe-
nomena that move or dwell upon its surface. Thus, although the ab-
sence of the beyond-the-horizon and that of the under-the-ground
reciprocate one another, they contrast markedly in their relation to
the perceivable present. We may describe this reciprocity and this
contrast thus: The beyond-the-horizon, by withholding its presence,
holds open the perceived landscape, while the under-the-ground, by re-
fusing its presence, supports the perceived landscape. The reciprocity
and asymmetry between these two realms bear an uncanny resem-
blance to the reciprocity and contrast between the future (or “what is
to come”) and the past (or “what has been”) in Martin Heidegger’s
description above—the one withholding presence, the other refusing
presence; both of them thus making possible the open presence of
the present. Dare we suspect that these two descriptions describe
one and the same phenomenon? I believe that we can, for the iso-
morphism is complete.

By READING MERLEAU-PONTY AND HEIDEGGER TOGETHER, AND
by setting their words in relation to our own experience, we have
begun to realize that the past and the future—these curious dimen-
sions—may be just as much spatial as they are temporal. Indeed, we
have begun to place these dimensions, to discern their location
within the sensuous world. The conceptual abstraction that we com-
monly term “the future” would seem to be born from our bodily
awareness of that which is hidden beyond the horizon—of that
which exceeds, and thus holds open, the living present. What we
commonly term “the past” would seem to be rooted in our carnal
sense of that which is hidden under the ground—of that which re-
sists, and thus supports, the living present. As ground and horizon,

Time, Space, and the Eclipse of the Earth 215

these dimensions are no more temporal than they are spatial, no
more mental than they are bodily and sensorial.

We can now discern just how close Merleau-Ponty was to this
discovery by reading his aforement »ned note of November 1960 in
the light of our disclosures:

In what sense the visible landscape under my eyes is not exterior
to, and bound systematically to... other moments of time and
the past, but has them really behind itself in simultaneity, inside it-
self and not it and they side by side “in” time.*3

For we can now understand this behind and this inside in a remark-
ably precise manner. The visible landscape has the other moments of
time “behind itself,” precisely in that the future waits beyond the
horizon, as well as behind every entity that I see, as the unseen “other
side” of the many visibles that surround me. And the visible land-
scape has the other moments of time “inside itself,” precisely in that
the past preserves itself under the ground, as well as inside every en-
tity that I perceive. The sensorial landscape, in other words, not only
opens onto that distant future waiting beyond the horizon but also
onto a near future, onto an immanent field of possibilities waiting
behind each tree, behind each stone, behind each leaf from whence a
spider may at any moment come crawling into our awareness. And
this living terrain is supported not only by that more settled or sed-
imented past under the ground, but by an immanent past resting in-
side each tree, within each blade of grass, within the very muscles
and cells of our own bodies.

It is thus that ecologists and environmental scientists may study
the recent past of a particular place by “coring” several of the stand-
ing trees, in order to count their interior rings and to interpret the
varying width of those rings (an extra-wide layer, fourteen rings in
from the cambium, suggests a season of abundant rain fourteen
years into the depth of the past, while an extra-thin layer tells of a
year without rainfall). The deeper past may be pondered by digging
a “soil pit” to expose the sedimented layers of the soil, and to inter-
pret the composition and structure of those layers (a layer of char-
coal, for instance, bespeaks a forest fire at that depth of the past).
Meanwhile, archaeologists, paleontologists, and geologists dig still

216 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

deeper beneath the ground of the present in order to unearth traces
of ancient epochs and eons.

That which has been and that which is to come are not else-
where—they are not autonomous dimensions independent of the
encompassing present in which we dwell. They are, rather, the very
depths of this living place—the hidden depth of its distances and the
concealed depth on which we stand.

PROMPTED BY THE PLACE-CENTERED DISCOURSE OF ORAL, INDIGE-
nous peoples—which seems to lack any absolute distinction between
“space” and “time”—and prompted as well by our analysis of writ-
ing and its perceptual effects, we have been searching for a possible
reconciliation between time and space. If the distinction between
these dimensions is not a necessary distinction, then we should be
able to demonstrate the possibility of another way of construing
events, one in which spatial and temporal aspects are not distin-
guishable.

And we have succeeded in demonstrating that there is at least one
way to unify the experience of time and of space, that it is indeed
possible to perceptually reconcile the temporal and the spatial in a
manner that accounts for the apparent openness of what we have
come to call the “future” and the apparent closedness of what we
have come to call the “past.” Heretofore, such a perceptual reconcil-
iation was thought to be impossible, usually because space—even
perceived space—was assumed to be essentially homogeneous, and
so to lack any structural asymmetry that might correspond with the
evident asymmetry of time. It is evident, however, that when our
awareness of time is joined with our awareness of space, space itself
is transformed. Space is no longer experienced as a homogeneous
void, but reveals itself as this vast and richly textured field in which
we are corporeally immersed, this vibrant expanse structured by
both a ground and a horizon. It is precisely the ground and the hori-
zon that transform abstract space into space-time. And these charac-
teristics—the ground and the horizon—are granted to us only by the
earth. Thus, when we let time and space blend into a unified space-
time, we rediscover the enveloping earth.

It would seem, then, that the conceptual separation of time and

Time, Space, and the Eclipse of the Earth 217

space—the literate distinction between a linear, progressive time
and a homogeneous, featureless space—functions to eclipse the en-
veloping earth from human awareness. As long as we structure our
lives according to assumed parameters of a static space and a recti-
linear time, we will be able to ignore, or overlook, our thorough de-
pendence upon the earth around us. Only when space and time are
reconciled into a single, unified field of phenomena does the encom-
passing earth become evident, once again, in all its power and its
depth, as the very ground and horizon of all our knowing.

In the Depths of the Sensuous

The importance that our analysis has led us to place on such taken
for granted phenomena as the ground and the horizon will seem
strange to most readers, indeed to all of us raised in a culture that
asks us to distrust our immediate sensory experience and to orient
ourselves instead on the basis of an abstract, “objective” reality
known only through quantitative measurement, technological in-
strumentation, and other exclusively human involvements. But for
those indigenous cultures still participant with the more-than-
human life-world, for those peoples that have not yet shifted their
synaesthetic focus from the animate earth to a purely human set of
signs, the riddles of the under-the-ground and the beyond-the-
horizon (the inside of things and the other side of things) are felt as
vast and powerful mysteries, the principal realms from whence be-
ings enter the animate world, and into which they depart.

For instance, among most native tribes of the American South-
west, where I live—including, among others, the Hopi, the Zu/fii, the
Tewa, the Tiwa, the Keresan, and the Navajo nations—the people
believe that they came into the world from under the ground. Ac-
cording to the Zufii emergence story, all the people (humans and all
other animals) originally lived in the fourth dark underworld within
the earth. They were summoned forth from there by Sun, who,
along with Moon, inhabited the bright world above Earth’s surface.

218 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

And so the animal-people gathered all their sacred bundles for mak-
ing rain, and for coaxing seeds to grow, and climbed upward along a
reed through the four underworlds—through the soot world, the
sulfur-smell world, the fog world, and the feather-wing world—until,
finally, they emerged into this world. From the sipapu, or place of
emergence, the people then spread out and began to settle the land.**

The Emergence is one of the most sacred and widely held beliefs
among native North Americans today, although it is particularly ev-
ident in the Southwest. In its structure the story of the people’s
emergence from under the ground, usually climbing up a reed or a
tree, mimics the emergence from the soil of the corn and other
plants harvested by the horticultural tribes of the Southwest. The
people who climb up from those depths in search of sunlight and
rain are like corn growing up through the soil.

But the Emergence is also akin to the process by which all mam-
mals, including humans, are born into this world, emerging from the
darkness of their mother’s womb into the spaciousness of the open
earth. “When we came up on this earth, it was just like a child being
born from its mother.”*® In fact, earlier tellings of the Zufii Emer-
gence, recorded in the last century, relate that long before the exis-
tence of the people, the Sun cohabited with the Earth, and it is thus
that life was conceived within the deepest, fourth womb of the
Earth.*’ Hence, the Emergence may be understood as the collective
birth of all peoples—of all animals and plants—after a prolonged
period of gestation in the dark depths of the ground.

The most sacred ceremonies of the pueblo-dwelling tribes take
place in the Aivas, the underground or partially underground cham-
bers also called “wombs” by many of the pueblo people. One enters
a kiva by climbing down a ladder through a hole in the roof, and after
the ceremony one leaves the kiva by climbing up through the same
opening, the same sipapu, reexperiencing—and renewing—the pri-
mordial emergence from the underworld. In fact, all sorts of earthly
openings—holes, caves, canyons, small depressions in the ground
and even in stones—are considered sipapu by the Pueblo peoples,
and so remind them of their origin under the ground that now sup-
ports them.

The individual experience of birth is thus related to the collective
emergence of life from under the ground. Similarly, human death,

Time, Space, and the Eclipse of the Earth 219

for oral peoples, is not just a personal event but also a transformation
in the land, a process whereby one’s individual sensibility opens out-
ward to rejoin the encompassing, more-than-human field of sensa-
tions. In an old Pawnee tale, a dead man returns as a ghost, saying,
“I am in everything; in the grass, the water.”*® The dead do not leave
the sensuous world, forsaking it for an immaterial heaven. Rather,
the vitality of one who dies is often thought to journey just beyond
the visible horizon, to a nearby land where all of the ancestors tradi-
tionally gather, and from whence they still influence events within
the land of the living. Among the above-mentioned Pueblo peoples,
for instance, the dead are thought to travel to the village of the kachi-
nas, which for the Zufi is located under a lake several days journey
to the west. The kachinas, the godlike ancestors, regularly return to
the various pueblos for the seasonal ceremonies at which they are
impersonated, or made visible, by masked dancers. But the kachinas
also visit the pueblos, whenever they wish, as rain-bearing clouds
that approach from beyond the horizon, carrying the life-giving mois-
ture so necessary to the corn and the other plants upon which these
horticultural peoples depend:

the Hopis—like the other Pueblos—believe their ancestors to be
fertilizing clouds, bringers of rain who will nourish the crops
upon which the living subsist. The necessity of death... be-
comes even more accentuated, therefore. ... Death brings into
existence the ancestors, who turn into clouds and kachinas that
bring rain; moisture feeds the corn and other foods that in turn

nourish the Hopi people themselves, and in the eternal cycle,
death feeds life.*°

Among nonhorticultural tribes as well, the dead are often thought
to journey to a land beyond the horizon, from whence they may
return among the living in the guise of animals and other natural
elements. Indeed, for many hunting peoples, the realm beyond the
mountains, or beyond the ocean, was where various animal species
resided when they were not evident in the present landscape, a realm
where the deer or the salmon were thought to remove their animal
guises and to live in quasi-human form. To cite a single example, the
Skagit Indians of northwestern North America held that the sal-

220 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

mon, when they are not spawning in the rivers, live beyond the hori-
zon in human form. Hence, in the nineteenth century, when several
of these Indians traveled to the eastern coast of North America and
saw the abundance of pale-skinned people living there, they re-
ported back that they had been to salmon country and had seen
salmon walking around as human beings. ©

For the American Plains tribes, at least in the nineteenth century,
the home of the dead beyond the horizon was commonly believed to
be a land always abundant in edible plants and wild game—the
“happy hunting ground” of popular legend. While some such in-
digenous notion of a fertile and abundant terrain where the ances-
tors dwell was likely the archaic source of even the Christian belief
in a heavenly paradise, it is important to realize that for oral peoples
such realms were never wholly cut off from the sensuous world of
the living present. They were not projected entirely outside of the
experienced world, but were felt as the mystery and hidden depth of
the sensuous world itself.

If we pay close attention to the life and activity of the great celes-
tial powers—the sun, the moon, and the clustered stars—we will see
that even these entities, so commonly associated with height and ver-
tical transcendence, seem to emerge from, and return to, the lands
beyond the horizon. Hence, if the Shoshoni Indians, for example,
assert that a dead person “follows the Milky Way” to the land of the
dead, this need not indicate, as some anthropologists have claimed,
that the Shoshoni believe in a celestial heaven.>! For the Milky Way
is but a visible trail or “way” followed by the spirits of the dead,
and this trail—as we can readily see—leads precisely beyond-the-
horizon.

Yet here we must acknowledge a strange ambiguity. The beyond-
the-horizon is that realm where the sun goes when it leaves us, and
the realm from which it emerges at dawn; it is where the moon goes
to and returns from. But we could just as well say the sun sinks into
the under-the-ground and the moon emerges from under-the-
ground. For when we attend closely to our direct, sensory experi-
ence of the rising and the setting, we see that the moon’s journey
beyond the horizon is also experienced as a movement down into the
ground, and indeed that the sun’s rise each morning is as much an
emergence from under the ground as is the emergence of a ground-

Time, Space, and the Eclipse of the Earth 221

hog at the end of winter! Hence, for example, these words by Kiowa
author N. Scott Momaday:

“Where does the sun live?”. . . [T]o the Indian child who asks the
question, the parent replies, “The sun lives in the earth.” The
sun-watcher among the Rio Grande Pueblos, whose sacred task it
is to observe, each day, the very point of the sun’s emergence on
the skyline, knows in the depths of his being that the sun is alive
and that it is indivisible with the earth, and he refers to the far-
thest eastern mesa as “the sun’s house.”. .. Should someone say
to the sun, “Where are you going?” the sun would surely answer,
“T am going home,” and it is understood at once that home is the
earth. All things are alive in this profound unity in which are all
elements, all animals, all things....[M]y father remembered
that, as a boy, he had watched with wonder and something like
fear the old man Koi-khan-hole, “Dragonfly,” stand in the first
light, his arms outstretched and his painted face fixed on the east,
“praying the sun out of the ground.”*?

Phenomenologically considered, it is as though the luminous orb of
the sun journeys into the ground each evening, moving all night
through, the density underfoot, to emerge, at dawn, at the oppo-
site side of the visible world. For some indigenous cultures, it is pre-
cisely during this journey through the ground that the sun
impregnates the earth with its fiery life, giving rise to the myriad liv-
ing things—human and nonhuman—that blossom forth on earth’s
surface.

So the journey beyond-the-horizon can lead under-the-ground,
and vice versa. We begin to glimpse here the secret identity, for oral
peoples, of those topological regions that we have come to call “the
past” and “the future”—the curious manner in which these two very
different modes of absence can nevertheless transmute into each
other, blur into one another, like moods. It is thus that many indige-
nous cultures have but a single term to designate the very deep past
and the far distant future. Among the Inuit of Baffin Island, for
example, the term uvatiarru may be translated both as “long ago”
and “in the future.”*? The cyclical metamorphosis of the distant
past into the distant future, or of that-which-has-been into that-

222 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

which-is-to-come, would seem to take place continually, in the depths
far below the visible present, in that place where the unseen lands
beyond the horizon seem to fold into the invisible density beneath
our feet.

MARTIN HEIDEGGER, WHOSE CAREFUL DESCRIPTIONS OF THE PAST
and the future have helped us to recognize these realms as actual di-
mensions of the perceptual field, did not write of only two temporal
dimensions, however, but of three, including that of the present. In
Being and Time, Heidegger asserts that the present has its own ec-
whither’ to which one

“ie

stasy, its own proper transcendence, its own
is carried away.”** The implication is that phenomena can be hidden
not just within the past or the future, but also within the very thick-
ness of the present, itself—that there is an enigmatic, hidden dimen-
sion at the very heart of the sensible present, into which phenomena
may withdraw and out of which they continually emerge. Thus in
“Time and Being,” Heidegger writes that “even in the present itself,
there always plays a kind of approach and bringing about, that is, a
kind of presencing.”*> As though, paradoxically, there is a modality
of absence entirely native to the present, out of which the present,
itself, comes to presence: “In the present, too, presencing is given.”*°

Is there, then, yet another mode of absence or invisibility entirely
endemic to the open landscape? I have already noticed, here within
the perceivable present, the hidden nature of what lies behind the
tree trunks and stones that surround me, which corresponds to the
unseen character of that which lies on the other side of these nearby
hills, and ultimately to those lands entirely bevond the horizon of
the perceivable present, from whence numerous entities enter the
visible terrain and into which various phenomena withdraw, recede,
and finally vanish from view. I have acknowledged as well the con-
cealed character of that which rests inside the trunks of these trees,
inside the stones and the hills, which corresponds, ultimately, to the
unseen nature of the under-the-ground, from whence beings sprout
and unfurl, and into which they also crumble, decompose, and are
submerged. Is there some other obvious style of absence, in the very
thickness of the present, that is unique to itself, and not a mere
modification of the under-the-ground or the beyond-the-horizon?

Time, Space, and the Eclipse of the Earth 223

Some mode of concealment that is, paradoxically, already out in the
open, from whence the visible landscape itself continually comes to
presence?

Perhaps I am pushing my method too far, here, in trying to place
not only the withholding of presence by the future and the refusal of
presence by the past, but also this concealment of presence from
within the present itself. For now, more than ever, I feel confused,—
unable to grasp, or to conceive of, what it is that I am searching for.
Even as I gaze out across the wooded hills, my mind seems muddled
by these questions, by ideas and associations that keep me from di-
rectly sensing and responding to the animate earth around me. I try
to relax, and so begin to breathe more deeply, enjoying the coolness
of the breeze as it floods in at my nostrils, feeling my chest and ab-
domen slowly expand and contract. My thinking begins to ease, the
internal chatter gradually taking on the rhythm of the in-breath and
the out-breath, the words themselves beginning to dissolve, flowing
out with each exhalation to merge with the silent breathing of the
land. The interior monologue dissipates, slowly, into the rustle of
pine needles and the stately gait of the clouds.

A butterfly glides by, golden wings navigating delicate air cur-
rents with a few momentary flutters before they settle on a white
flower. The seedstalks of the grasses bounce in the breeze, while
clustered wildflowers tremble on their stems, awaiting the humming
insects that motor haphazardly from one to the other. Fragrant
whiffs from new blossoms in the overgrown orchard by the creek stir
not only the winged beings, but my own flaring nostrils as they reach
me from afar, drifting like spiderwebs on the faint winds. My sens-
ing body now vividly awake to the world, I gradually become con-
scious of a third mode of invisibility, of an unseen dimension in
which I am so thoroughly and deeply immersed that even now I can
hardly bring it to full awareness. .. .

It is the invisibility of the air.

7
The Forgetting and
Remembering of the Air

Let’s sit down here . . . on the open prairie, where we can’t see a high-
way or a fence. Let’s have no blankets to sit on, but feel the ground
with our bodies, the earth, the yielding shrubs. Let’s have the grass for
a mattress, experiencing its sharpness and its softness. Let us become
like stones, plants, and trees. Let us be animals, think and feel like an-
imals. Listen to the air. You can hear it, feel it, smell it, taste it. Woniya
wakan—the holy air—which renews all by its breath. Woniya, woniya
wakan—spirit, life, breath, renewal—it means all that. Woniya—we sit
together, don’t touch, but something is there; we feel it between us, as
a presence. A good way to start thinking about nature, talk about it.
Rather talk to it, talk to the rivers, to the lakes, to the winds as to our
relatives.

—JOHN FirRE LAME DEER

HAT A MYSTERY IS THE AIR, WHAT AN ENIGMA TO THESE

human senses! On the one hand, the air is the most per-

vasive presence I can name, enveloping, embracing, and

caressing me both inside and out, moving in ripples along my skin,

flowing between my fingers, swirling around my arms and thighs,

rolling in eddies along the roof of my mouth, slipping ceaselessly

through throat and trachea to fill the lungs, to feed my blood, my

heart, my self. I cannot act, cannot speak, cannot think a single

thought without the participation of this fluid element. I am im-
mersed in its depths as surely as fish are immersed in the sea.

Yet the air, on the other hand, is the most outrageous absence

known to this body. For it is utterly invisible. I know very well that

there is something there—I can feel it moving against my face and

225

226 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

can taste it and smell it, can even hear it as it swirls within my ears
and along the bark of trees, but still, I cannot see it. I can see the
steady movement it induces in the shapeshifting clouds, the way it
bends the branches of the cottonwoods, and sends ripples along the
surface of a stream. The fluttering wing feathers of a condor soaring
overheard; the spiraling trajectory of a leaf as it falls; a spider web
billowing like a sail; the slow drift of a seed through space—all make
evident, to my eyes, the sensuous presence of the air. Yet these eyes
cannot see the air itself.

Unlike the hidden character of what lies beyond the horizon, and
unlike the unseen nature of that which resides under the ground, the
air is invisible 7m principle. That which today lies beyond the horizon
can at least partly be disclosed by journeying into that future, as that
which waits under the ground can be somewhat unearthed by exca-
vations into the past. But the air can never be opened for our eyes,
never made manifest. Itself invisible, it is the medium through
which we see all else in the present terrain.

And this unseen enigma is the very mystery that enables life to
live. It unites our breathing bodies not only with the under-the-
ground (with the rich microbial life of the soil, with fossil and
mineral deposits deep in the bedrock), and not only with the
beyond-the-horizon (with distant forests and oceans), but also with
the interior life of all that we perceive in the open field of the living
present—the grasses and the aspen leaves, the ravens, the buzzing
insects and the drifting clouds. What the plants are quietly breathing
out, we animals are breathing in; what we breathe out, the plants are
breathing in. The air, we might say, is the soul of the visible land-
scape, the secret realm from whence all beings draw their nourish-
ment. As the very mystery of the living present, it is that most
intimate absence from whence the present presences, and thus a key
to the forgotten presence of the earth.

NOTHING IS MORE COMMON TO THE DIVERSE INDIGENOUS CUL-
tures of the earth than a recognition of the air, the wind, and the
breath, as aspects of a singularly sacred power. By virtue of its per-
vading presence, its utter invisibility, and its manifest influence on
all manner of visible phenomena, the air, for oral peoples, is the ar-

The Forgetting and Remembering of the Air 227

chetype of all that is ineffable, unknowable, yet undeniably real and
efficacious. Its obvious ties to speech—the sense that spoken words
are structured breath (try speaking a word without exhaling at the
same time), and indeed that spoken phrases take their communica-
tive power from this invisible medium that moves between us—
lends the air a deep association with linguistic meaning and with
thought. Indeed, the ineffability of the air seems akin to the ineffa-
bility of awareness itself, and we should not be surprised that many
indigenous peoples construe awareness, or “mind,” not as a power
that resides inside their heads, but rather as a quality that they them-
selves are inside of, along with the other animals and the plants, the
mountains and the clouds.

According to Robert Lawlor, a researcher who has lived and stud-
ied among the indigenous cultures of Australia, Aboriginal peoples
tend to consider the visible entities around them—rocks, persons,
leaves—as crystallizations of conscious awareness, while the invisi-
ble medium between such entities is experienced as what Westerners
would call “the unconscious,” the creative but unseen realm from
which such conscious forms arise.! Thus, the Alcheringa, or Dream-
time—that implicit realm of dreamlike happenings from whence the
visible present is continually emerging—resides not just within the
hills and landforms of the surrounding terrain, but also in the invis-
ible depths of the air itself, in the thickness of the very medium that
flows within us and all around us. This leads Aboriginal Australians
to accord awesome significance to various atmospheric phenomena.
Flashes of lightning are experienced as violent discharges from the
depths of the Dreaming. Birds, who wing their way through the in-
visible, are often experienced as messengers of the unconscious,
while the rainbow (the Rainbow Snake, who arcs upward across the
sky and then dives back into the earth) is felt to personify all the
most implacable, dangerous, and yet life-giving forces in the land.*
For the rainbow is perceived as the very edge of the Dreaming, as
that place where the invisible, unconscious potentials begin to be-
come visible.?

228 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

wind and Spirit on the Great Plains

The omnipresent and yet invisible nature of the air ensures that the
indigenous beliefs and teachings regarding this elemental mystery
are among the most sacred and secret of oral traditions. Native
teachings regarding the wind or the breath are exceedingly difficult
to track or to record, for to give voice to them unnecessarily may vi-
olate the mystery and holiness of this enveloping power, this enig-
matic presence (or absence) so obviously essential to one’s life and
the life of the land.

We do know that the air was an uncommonly sacred power for
most of the native peoples of North America. Among the Creek In-
dians of the Southeast, for instance, the creator god—the only di-
vinity equal to or exceeding the Earth and the Sun in its power—is
called Hesakitumesee, the Master of Breath; it is this being who
sends fog, wind, and other weather across the land, affecting the des-
tiny of the people.*

For the Lakota Nation, the most sacred or wakan aspect of
Wakan Tanka, the Great Mysterious, is Taku SkanSkan, the En-
veloping Sky. Known to the shamans simply as Skan, Taku
Skan$kan is felt to be everywhere, the omnipresent spirit that im-
parts life, motion, and thought to all things, vet is visible to us only
as the blue of the sky. (It is this deity that contemporary Lakota per-
sons sometimes address, in English, as the Great Spirit.) Tate (pro-
nounced “Tah-day”)—Wind—is created by Skan out of his own
substance, to be a companion for Skan and to carry his wishes and
messages throughout the world. (Skan and Tate—Sky and Wind—
are thus sometimes spoken of as the same entity by the Lakota
shamans.) And it was Tate who mated with Ite (“Ee-day”), a beau-
tiful woman of the Buffalo people; from this union Ite gave birth to
the North Wind, the East Wind, the South Wind, and the West
Wind (as well as to Yum, the little whirlwind or dust-devil). These
four Winds structure, and lend their particular magics, to every
Lakota ritual practiced today.°

Meanwhile, the peace pipe is the most zakan of all possessions
for the Lakota. Carved from dark red pipestone found only in the

The Forgetting and Remembering of the Air 229

northern plains—a stone considered to be the petrified blood of
their ancestors—the sacred pipe is smoked in ritual fashion during
all of the diverse Lakota ceremonies, from the sweat lodge to the
Sun Dance. The pipe smoke makes the invisible breath visible, and
as it rises from the pipe, it makes visible the flows and currents in the
air itself, makes visible the unseen connections between those who
smoke the pipe in offering and all other entities that dwell within the
world: the winged peoples, the other walking and crawling peoples,
and the multiple rooted beings—trees, grasses, shrubs, mosses.’
Further, the rising smoke carries the prayers of the Lakota people to
the sky beings—to the sun and the moon, to the stars, to the thunder
beings and the clouds, to all those powers embraced by woniya
wakan, the holy air.

Woniya wakan—the holy air—which renews all by its breath.
Woniya, wontya wakan—spirit, life, breath, renewal—it means
all that. Woniya—we sit together, don’t touch, but something
is there; we feel it between us, as a presence.®

At the opening of any ceremony, a Lakota medicine person fills and
lights the sacred pipe, and then, before smoking it himself, offers the
mouthpiece to the West Wind so that the wind itself may partake of
the smoke. Then, circling, he offers the pipe to be smoked by the
North Wind, then to the East Wind, and finally to the South Wind.
As the messengers of the gods, the winds are the first powers to be
addressed in any ceremony.’

The winds of the four directions are also deeply associated with
the cyclical, spatial sense of time. An old Lakota shaman, named
Sword, interviewed early in the twentieth century, related that in
any ceremony, after offering the mouthpiece of the lit pipe to each of
the four winds,

the shaman should move the pipe in the same manner until the
mouthpiece again points toward the west, and say: “Circling, I
complete the four quarters and the time.” He should do this be-
cause the four winds are the four quarters of the circle and
mankind knows not where they may be or whence they may come
and the pipe should be offered directly toward them. The four

230 ‘THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

quarters embrace all that are in the world and all that are in the
sky. Therefore, by circling the pipe, the offering is made to all the
gods. The circle is the symbol of time, for the day time, the night
time, and the moon time are circles above the world, and the year
time is a circle around the border of the world. Therefore the
lighted pipe moved in a complete circle is an offering to all the

times.!°

After completing the circle, the shaman points the mouthpiece of
the pipe toward the sky, and offers it to Wind, Tate, the father of the
four Winds. Finally, then, “the shaman should smoke the pipe and
while doing so should say: ‘I smoke with the Great Spirit. Let us
have a blue day.’ ”!!

Air and Awareness Among the Diné, or Navajo

While the air is held sacred throughout native North America, the
most extensively documented interpretation of the air is probably
the Diné, or Navajo, concept of mlch’i—the Holy Wind. Long mis-
understood by anthropologists, the Navajo term milch’i refers to the
whole body of the air or the atmosphere, including the air when in
motion, as well as the air that swirls within us as we breathe. Ac-
cording to James Kale McNeley, in his meticulously documented
book Holy Wind in Navajo Philosophy, nilch’i, “meaning Wind, Air,
or Atmosphere,” suffuses all of nature, and is that which grants life,
movement, speech, and awareness to all beings. Moreover, the Holy
Wind serves as the means of communication between all beings and
elements of the animate world. Nilch’i is thus utterly central to the
Diné, or Navajo worldview.!2

Although nilch’i is conceived by the Navajo as a single, unified
phenomenon, the Wind in its totality 1s also assumed to be com-
prised of many diverse aspects, a plurality of partial Winds, each of
which have their own name in the Navajo language. One of these—
nilch’t hwi’siziinii, or “the Wind within one”—refers to that part of
the overall Wind that circulates within each individual. This notion

The Forgetting and Remembering of the Air 231

was mistaken by early missionaries, and by the important mission-
ary/ethnologist Father Berard Haile, to be a phenomenon akin to the
personal soul of Christian belief. Thus, “the Wind within one” was
interpreted, until recently, to be an immaterial spirit or soul, a thor-
oughly autonomous entity that enters the individual at birth, acts
as the internal source of his or her life and behavior, and then de-
parts from the individual at death.!? Only recently have anthropolo-
gists like McNeley been able to break out of the interpretive
blinders imposed by the Christian worldview in order to recognize
that the powers attributed by Western culture to a purely internal
soul or mind are experienced by the Navajo as attributes of the en-
veloping Wind or Atmosphere as a whole. The “Wind within one” is
in no way autonomous, for it is in a continual process of interchange
with the various winds that surround one, and indeed is entirely a
part of the Holy Wind itself.

WE MaAay BRING OURSELVES CLOSE TO THE ORAL EXPERIENCE OF THE
air by consulting the words of the Navajo elders themselves, and by
pondering the preeminent influence of Wind, or Air, within the
Navajo universe.

Wind existed first, as a person, and when the Earth began its ex-
istence Wind took care of it. We started existing where Dark-
nesses, lying on one another, occurred. Here, the one that had lain
on top became Dawn, whitening across. What used to be lying on
one another back then, this is Wind. It (Wind) was Darkness.
That is why when Darkness settles over you at night it breezes
beautifully. It is this, it is a person, they say. From there when it
dawns, when it dawns beautifully becoming white-streaked
through the dawn, it usually breezes. Wind exists beautifully,
they say. Back there in the underworlds, this was a person it
seems.!*

Already in the underworlds, in those times or realms beneath the
ground, prior to the emergence of the Holy People into the world of
the present, Wind existed and provided both breath and guidance to
the other Holy Ones, such as First Man, First Woman, Talking

232 $THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

God, and Calling God. When these Holy People emerged from the
ground into this world on Earth’s surface, they were accompanied by
Wind. Already differentiated as the Winds of Darkness and of
Dawn, Wind now differentiated itself further into the Blue Wind of
noonand the Yellow Wind of twilight. These four Winds spread out
from the emergence place and were then placed by the Earth in the
four directions, along the horizon of the world—Dawn Woman in the
east, Horizontal Blue Girl in the south, Horizontal Yellow Boy (or
evening twilight) in the west, and Darkness Man (or night) in the
north (the precise names of these Winds vary from one chant to an-
other; often they are simply spoken of as White Wind, Blue Wind,
Yellow Wind, and Dark Wind). These four Winds—or four Words,
as they are also called—are said to be the means of breath of the four
sacred mountains that visibly rise at the edge of the Navajo cosmos,
one in each of the cardinal directions. “They [the Winds] stand
within the mountains, these [mountains] from then on being, by
them, our sacred ones to the end of time.”!5 Similarly, the Sun and
the Moon have their own Winds, which are their means of life and
breath. Other Winds surround and move between these great pow-
ers, as their means of communication with each other and with other
phenomena. From its sacred home in each of the four directions, the
Holy Wind is said to approach and enter into the various natural
phenomena of the world, and so to provide the means of life, move-
ment, thought, and speech to the plants, to the animals, and to all the
other Earth Surface People, including the Navajo people them-
selves.!®

Wind is believed by the Diné to be present within a person from
the very moment of conception, when two Winds, one from the bod-
ily fluids of the father and one from those of the mother, form a sin-
gle Wind within the embryo. It is the motion of this Wind that
produces the movement and growth of the developing fetus. When
the baby is born, the Navajo say that the Wind within it “unfolds
him”?? and it is then, when the infant commences breathing, that an-
other, surrounding Wind enters into the child. This Wind may be
sent from one of the four directions along the horizon, or from the
Sun, or the Moon, or from the Ground itself—indeed from any nat-
ural phenomenon. Of course, the particular Wind that enters with
the first breath will have a powerful influence upon the whole course

The Forgetting and Remembering of the Air 233

of that person’s life. Yet other Winds will enter at later moments in
the development of the child, so that, as McNeley writes, “the grow-
ing child is believed to be continually subject to the influence of
Winds existing around him.”!8

Although invisible, the Holy Wind can be recognized by the
swirling and spiraling traces that it continually leaves in the visible
world. The Winds that enter a human being leave their trace, ac-
cording to the Navajo, in the vortices or swirling patterns to be seen
on our fingertips and the tips of our toes, and in the spiraling pattern
made by the hairs as they emerge from our heads. As one elder ex-
plains:

There are whorls here at the tips of our fingers. Winds stick out
here. It is the same way on the toes of our feet, and Winds exist
on us here where soft spots are, where there are spirals. At the
tops of our heads some children have two spirals, some have only
one, you see. I am saying that those (who have two) live by means
of two Winds. These (Winds sticking out of the) whorls at the
tips of ourtoes hold us to the Earth. Those at our fingertips hold
us to the Sky. Because of these, we do not fall when we move
about.!®

Further, it is Wind that enables us to speak. We have already
noted that the four Winds of the cardinal directions are also called
the “four Words.” Since we speak only by means of the breath,
Wind itself—the collective breath—is said to hold the power of lan-
guage: “It is only by means of Wind that we talk. It exists at the tip
of our tongues. ”2°

Summing up these various conceptions, McNeley writes:

[A]ccording to the Navajo conception, then, Winds exist all
around and within the individual, entering and departing
through respiratory organs and whorls on the body’s surface.
That which is within and that which surrounds one is all the same
and it is holy.”

Finally, and most profoundly, this invisible medium, in which we are
bodily immersed, is what provides us with the capacity for conscious

234 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

thought. It was mentioned above that the sacred Mountains in
the four directions have various Winds that move between them
as their means of communication with each other and with other en-
tities. The invisible Wind that swirls within and around each indi-
vidual person is assumed to consist, in part, of such messenger
Winds from the four directions. Two of these Winds, often spoken
of as Little Winds or Wind’s Children, are believed to be the in-
dividual’s “means of knowing.”2? These two Little Winds linger
within the spiraling folds of our two ears, and it is from there
that they offer guidance to us, alerting us to near and distant diffi-
culties, helping us to plan and to make choices. When a Navajo per-
son finds himself thinking in words, this is said to be the voice of
one or both of these two Little Winds speaking into his ears.?3 Of
course these Wind’s Children are simply little currents or vortices
within the vast body of mlch’i—the Holy Wind—which exists every-
where. In the words of one elder; “The one called Wind’s Child,
this is just like living in water”—that is, Wind’s Child is inseparable
from the swirling body of air in which we are thoroughly im-
mersed.*

Such Little Winds from the four directions dwell not only in
human ears, but in the ears or earlike aspects of all living things,
providing their means of hearing, knowing, and communicating
with others.2> It is thus that other animals, for instance, know what
we humans are thinking about them: “When we are thinking well of
them—horses, cattle, goats, and everything that we live by—they
know about it by means of Wind. They know our thinking.”2® Some
elders say that nowadays Little Winds from the four directions no
longer advise or speak to the Navajo as clearly as they once did, but
that such Little Winds still speak clearly into the ears of other ani-
mals, telling them of what is happening in the world; and animals
like Coyote and Owl often communicate such knowledge to the
Navajo, warning the humans of dangerous situations by specific
sounds and behaviors.?’

Now, when referring to the multiple and diverse Winds such as
Dawn Man or Dawn Woman, Sky Blue Woman, Twilight Man,
Dark Wind, Wind’s Child, Revolving Wind, Glossy Wind, Rolling
Darkness Wind, and others, the Navajo are not speaking of ab-
stract or ideal entities but of palpable phenomena—of the actual

The Forgetting and Remembering of the Air 235

gusts, breezes, whirlwinds, eddies, stormfronts, crosscurrents, gales,
whiffs, blasts, and breaths that they perceive in the fluid medium
that surrounds and flows through their bodies. The profound belief
in the overall unity of nilch’i, the Navajo conviction that all of these
subsidiary Winds are internal expressions of a single, inexhaustible
mystery, is obviously born of the observation that the multiple at-
mospheric vortices made by their own breathing—or by the heat ris-
ing in waves from the sun-baked cliff, or the branches of trees as
they divide the surging air, or the minute trembling of a rattlesnake’s
tail—that all these evident currents and eddies swirling around and
even inside them are not entirely autonomous forces, but rather are
momentary articulations within the vast and fathomless body of Air
itself.

It is clear, however, that there is a kind of provisional autonomy or
identity to the various winds that are part of the overall atmos-
phere—the warm and sluggish air lingering in the sandy arroyo
every afternoon is obviously different from the cool breeze blowing
through the cottonwoods along the river. To the Navajo there are
unpredictable Winds as well as steady Winds, helpful Winds and
Harmful Winds. Certain dangerous Winds, for example, can alter
the character of the good Winds within a living person, or can bring
difficulty and harm to the community, or to the land. Each person
must navigate through this world of diverse invisible influences with
great care, strengthening her contact with the various good Winds
by respecting the land itself, striving to bring her life into harmony,
or hozho, with the four directions, into reciprocity with the Ground
and the Sky, with the Sun, the Moon, and the Stars.

Like the mountains of the four directions, and like the other ani-
mals and the plants, humans are themselves one of the Wind’s
dwelling places, one of its multiple centers, and just as we are nour-
ished and influenced by the Air at large, so do our actions and
thoughts affect the Air in turn. The individual, that is, is not passive
with respect to the Holy Wind; rather she participates 77 it, asoneof
its organs. Her own desire and intent (her own interior Wind) par-
ticipates directly in the life of the invisible Wind all around her, and
hence can engage and subtly influence events in the surrounding ter-
rain—even, in some measure, the becoming-abundant of rain
clouds, the gestation of seeds, and the seasonal procreation of ani-

236 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

mals. Hence the emphasis among the Navajo, and indeed among so
many native peoples, upon concentrated thought and prayer in order
to influence and aid the continual emergence of such earthly occur-
rences from unmanifest (implicit, invisible) to manifest (visible) ex-
istence.

It is through the ritual power of speech and song that the Navajo
are enabled most powerfully to affect and alter events in the en-
veloping cosmos. According to Gary Witherspoon, in his landmark
study of Language and Art in the Navajo Universe,”® the Navajo con-
sider the act of speech to be an externalization of thought, “an im-
position of form upon the external world” in which the surrounding
Air is transformed.”? And because the Air or Wind is the very
medium in which the other natural forces live and act, by transform-
ing the Air through song, the singer is able to affect and subtly in-
fluence the activity of the great natural powers themselves.

When a Navajo person wishes to renew or reestablish, in the
world, the harmonious condition of well-being and beauty ex-
pressed by the Navajo word hozho he must first strive, through rit-
ual, to create this harmony and peacefulness within his own being.
Having established such hozho within himself, he can then actively
impart this state of well-being to the enveloping cosmos, through
the transforming power of song or prayer. Finally, according to
Witherspoon,

[a]fter a person has projected hozho into the air through ritual
form, he then, at the conclusion of the ritual, breathes that hozho
back into himself and makes himself a part of the order, har-
mony, and beauty he has projected into the world through the rit-
ual mediums of speech and song.*°

This brief quote from Witherspoon makes especially evident the
reciprocal, even circular character of the relation between the
Navajo people and the animate cosmos that enfolds and includes
them. They are not passive with respect to the other powers of this
world, or rather they are both passive and active, inhaling and exhal-
ing, receiving the nourishment of the diverse beings and actively
nourishing them in turn. As it is spoken in the Blessingway cere-
mony:

The Forgetting and Remembering of the Air 237

With everything having life, with everything having the power of
speech, with everything having the power to breathe, with everything
having the power to teach and guide, with that in blessing we will
live.3!

For the Navajo, then, the Air—particularly in its capacity to pro-
vide awareness, thought, and speech—has properties that European,
alphabetic civilization has traditionally ascribed to an interior, indi-
vidual human “mind” or “psyche.” Yet by attributing these powers
to the Air, and by insisting that the “Winds within us” are thor-
oughly continuous with the Wind at large—with the invisible
medium in which we are immersed—the Navajo elders suggest that
that which we call the “mind” is not ours, is not a human possession.
Rather, mind as Wind is a property of the encompassing world, in
which humans—like all other beings—participate. One’s individual
awareness, the sense of a relatively personal self or psyche, is simply
that part of the enveloping Air that circulates within, through, and
around one’s particular body; hence, one’s own intelligence is as-
sumed, from the start, to be entirely participant with the swirling
psyche of the land. Any undue harm that befalls the land is readily
felt within the awareness of all who dwell within that land. And thus
the health, balance, and well-being of each person is inseparable
from the health and well-being of the enveloping earthly terrain.

THE NAVAJO IDENTIFICATION OF AWARENESS WITH THE AIR—THEIR
intuition that the psyche is not an immaterial power that resides in-
sideus, but is rather the invisible yet thoroughly palpable medium in
which we (along with the trees, the squirrels, and the clouds) are
immersed—must seem at first bizarre, even outrageous, to persons
of European ancestry. Yet a few moments’ etymological research
will reveal that this identification is not nearly so alien to European
civilization as one might assume. Indeed, our English term “psy-
che”—together with all its modern offspring like “psychology,”
“psychiatry,” and “psychotherapy”—is derived from the ancient
Greek word psyché, which signified not merely the “soul,” or the
“mind,” but also a “breath,” or a “gust of wind.” The Greek noun
was itself derived from the verb psychein, which meant “to breathe,”

238 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

or “to blow.”32, Meanwhile, another ancient Greek word for “air,
wind, and breath”—the term pneuma, from which we derive such
terms as “pneumatic” and “pneumonia”—also and at the same time
signified that vital principle which in English we call “spirit.”33

Of course, the word “spirit” itself, despite all of its incorporeal
and non-sensuous connotations, is directly related to the very bodily
term “respiration” through their common root in the Latin word
spiritus, which signified both “breath” and “wind.”3* Similarly, the
Latin word for “soul,” antma—from whence have evolved such En-
glish terms as “animal,” “animation,
(being of one mind, or one soul), also signified “air” and “breath.”
Moreover, these were not separate meanings; itis clear that anima, like
psyché, originally named an elemental phenomenon that somehow
comprised both what we now call “the air” and what we now term
“the soul.” The more specific Latin word animus, which signified
“that which thinks in us,” was derived from thesameairy root, anima,
itself derived from the older Greek term anemos, meaning “wind.”>

We find an identical association of the “mind” with the “wind”
and the “breath” in innumerable ancient languages. Even such an
objective, scientifically respectable word as “atmosphere” displays
its ancestral ties to the Sanskrit word atman, which signified “soul”
as well as the “air” and the “breath.” Thus, a great many terms that
now refer to the air as a purely passive and insensate medium are
clearly derived from words that once identified the air with life and
awareness! And words that now seem to designate a strictly immate-
rial mind, or spirit, are derived from terms that once named the
breath as the very substance of that mystery.*6

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that, for ancient Mediter-
ranean cultures no less than for the Lakota and the Navajo, the air
was once a singularly sacred presence. As the experiential source of
both psyche and spirit, it would seem that the air was once felt to be
the very matter of awareness, the subtle body of the mind. And
hence that awareness, far from being experienced as a quality that dis-
tinguishes humans from the rest of nature, was originally felt as that
which invisibly joined human beings to the other animals and to the
plants, to the forests and to the mountains. For it was the unseen but
common medium of their existence.

But how, then, did the air come to lose its psychological quality?

9 6

animism,” and “unanimous”

The Forgetting and Remembering of the Air 239

How did the psyche withdraw so thoroughly from the world around
us, leaving the cedar trees, the spiders, the stones, and the storm
clouds without that psychological depth in which they used to dwell
(without, indeed, any psychological resonance or even relevance)?
How did the psyche, the spirit, or the mind retreat so thoroughly
into the human skull, leaving the air itself a thin and taken-for-
granted presence, commonly equated, today, with mere empty space?
Read on.

wind, Breath, and Speech

Like so many ancient and tribal languages, Hebrew has a single word
for both “spirit” and “wind”—the word ruach. What is remarkable
here is the evident centrality of ruach, the spiritual wind, to early
Hebraic religiosity. The primordiality of ruach, and its close associ-
ation with the divine, is manifest in the very first sentence of the He-
brew Bible:

When God began to create heaven and earth—the earth being un-
formed and void, with darkness over the surface of the deep and
a wind [ruach] from God sweeping over the water . . .*7

At the very beginning of creation, before even the existence of the
earth or the sky, God is present as a wind moving over the waters.
Remember the similar primordiality of the wind in the Navajo
telling: “Wind existed first. ..and when the Earth began its exis-
tence Wind took care of it.”38 And breath, as we learn in the next
section of Genesis, is the most intimate and elemental bond linking
humans to the divine; it is that which flows most directly between
God and man. For after God forms an earthling (adam), from the
dust of the earth (adamah), he blows into the earthling’s nostrils
the breath of life, and the human awakens.*? Although ruach may be
used to refer to the breath, the Hebrew term used here is neshamah,
which denotes both the breath and the soul. While ruach generally

240 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

refers to the wind, or spirit, at large, neshamah commonly signi-
fies the more personal, individualized aspect of wind, the wind or
breath of a particular body—like the “Wind within one” of a Navajo
person. In this sense, neshamah is also used to signify conscious
awareness.

We moderns tend to view ancient Hebraic culture through the in-
tervening lens of Greek and Christian thought; even Jewish scholar-
ship, and much contemporary Jewish self-understanding, has been
subtly influenced and informed by centuries of Hellenic and Chris-
tian interpretation. It is only thus that many persons today associate
the ancient Hebrews with such anachronistic notions as the belief in
an otherworldly heaven and hell, or a faith in the immateriality and
immortality of the personal soul. Yet such dualistic notions have no
real place in the Hebrew Bible. Careful attention to the evidence
suggests that ancient Hebraic religiosity was far more corporeal,
and far more responsive to the sensuous earth, than we commonly
assume.

Of course, the ancient Hebrews were, as we have seen, among the
first communities to make sustained use of phonetic writing, the
first bearers of an alphabet. Moreover, unlike the other Semitic peo-
ples, they did not restrict their use of the alphabet to economic and
political record-keeping, but used it to record ancestral stories, tra-
ditions, and laws. They were perhaps the first nation to so thor-
oughly shift their sensory participation away from the forms of
surrounding nature to a purely phonetic set of signs, and so to expe-
rience the profound epistemological independence from the natural
environment that was made possible by this potent new technology.
To actively participate with the visible forms of nature came to be
considered idolatry by the ancient Hebrews; it was not the land but
the written letters that now carried the ancestral wisdom.”

Yet although the Hebrews renounced all animistic engagement
with the wisible forms of the natural world (whether with the moon,
or the sun, or those animals—like the bull—sacred to other peoples
of the Middle East), they nevertheless retained a participatory rela-
tionship with the invisible medium of that world—with the wind
and the breath.

The power of this relationship may be directly inferred from the
very structure of the Hebrew writing system, the aleph-beth. This

The Forgetting and Remembering of the Air 241

ancient alphabet, in contrast to its European derivatives, had no let-
ters for what we have come to call “the vowels.” The twenty-two let-
ters of the Hebrew aleph-beth were all consonants. Thus, in order to
read a text written in traditional Hebrew, one had to infer the appro-
priate vowel sounds from the consonantal context, and add them
when sounding out the written syllables.

This lack of written vowels is only partly explained by the mor-
phological structure of the Semitic languages, in which words with
the same combination of consonants (usually grouped in clusters of
three) tend to have a related meaning. This morphology ensured
that a person fluent in the Hebrew language could, with effort, cor-
rectly decipher a Hebrew text without the aid of written vowels.
Nevertheless, additional letters for vowels would have greatly facili-
tated the reading of ancient Hebrew. The fact that some later He-
brew scribes, taking their lead from a standard practice of’ the
Aramaeans, occasionally used the consonants H, W, and Y to suggest
specific vowel sounds, is evidence that the lack of written vowels was
indeed felt as a difficulty. When, in the seventh century C.E., vowel
indicators in the form of little dots and dashes inserted below and
above the letters were finally introduced into Hebrew texts, the use-
fulness of those marks made them a standard component of many
Hebrew texts thereafter.”

Another, perhaps more significant, reason for the absence of writ-
ten vowels in the traditional aleph-beth has to do with the nature of
the vowel sounds themselves. While consonants are those shapes
made by the lips, teeth, tongue, palate, or throat, that momentarily
obstruct the flow of breath and so give form to our words and
phrases, the vowels are those sounds that are made by the unim-
peded breath itself. The vowels, that is to say, are nothing other than
sounded breath. And the breath, for the ancient Semites, was the very
mystery of life and awareness, a mystery inseparable from the invis-
ible ruach—the holy wind or spirit. The breath, as we have noted,
was the vital substance blown into Adam’s nostrils by God himself,
who thereby granted life and consciousness to humankind. It is pos-
sible, then, that the Hebrew scribes refrained from creating distinct
letters for the vowel-sounds in order to avoid making a visible repre-
sentation of the invisible. To fashion a visible representation of the
vowels, of the sounded breath, would have been to concretize the in-

242 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

effable, to make a visible likeness of the divine. It would have been to
make a visible representation of a mystery whose very essence was to
be invisible and hence unknowable—the sacred breath, the holy
wind. And thus it was not done.

Of course, we do not know if the thought of imaging the vowels,
or the sounded breath, even occurred to the ancient Semitic scribes;
it is entirely possible that their reverent relation to the wind and the
air—their sense of the sacredness of this element that lends its com-
municative magic to all spoken utterances—simply precluded such a
notion from even arising. In any case, whether the avoidance of
vowel notation was conscious or inadvertent, the absence of written
vowels marks a profound difference between the ancient Semitic
aleph-beth and the subsequent European alphabets.

For example, unlike texts written with the Greek or the Roman
alphabets, a Hebrew text simply could not be experienced as a dou-
ble—a stand-in, or substitute—for the sensuous, corporeal world.
The Hebrew letters and texts were not sufficient unto themselves; in
order to be read, they had to be added to, enspirited by the reader’s
breath. The invisible air, the same mystery that animates the visible
terrain, was also needed to animate the visible letters, to make them
come alive and to speak. The letters themselves thus remained
overtly dependent upon the elemental, corporeal life-world—they
were activated by the very breath of that world, and could not be cut
off from that world without losing all of their power. In this manner
the absence of written vowels ensured that Hebrew language and
tradition remained open to the power of that which exceeds the
strictly human community—it ensured that the Hebraic sensibility
would remain rooted, however tenuously, in the animate earth.
(While the Hebrew Bible would become, as we have seen, a kind
of portable homeland for the Jewish people, it could never entirely
take the place of the breathing land itself, upon which the text man-
ifestly depends. Hence the persistent themes of exile and longed-
for return that reverberate through Jewish history down to the
present day.)

The absence of written vowels in ancient Hebrew entailed that
the reader of a traditional Hebrew text had to actively choose the ap-
propriate breath sounds or vowels, yet different vowels would often
vary the meaning of the written consonants (much as the meaning

The Forgetting and Remembering of the Air 243

of the consonantal cluster “RD,” in English, will vary according
to whether we insert a long o sound between those consonants,
“RoaD”; or a long 7 sound, “RiDe”; a short e sound, “ReD”; or a
long e sound, “ReaD”). The reader of a traditional Hebrew text
must actively choose one pronunciation over another, according to
the fit of that meaning within the written context, yet the precise
meaning of that context would itself have been determined by the
particular vowels already chosen by that reader.*?

The traditional Hebrew text, in other words, overtly demanded
the reader’s conscious participation. The text was never complete in
itself; it had to be actively engaged by a reader who, by this engage-
ment, gave rise to'a particular reading. Only in relation—only by
being taken up and actively interpreted by a particular reader—did
the text become meaningful. And there was no single, definitive
meaning; the ambiguity entailed by the lack of written vowels en-
sured that diverse readings, diverse shades of meaning, were always
possible.

Some form of active participation, as we have seen, is necessary
to all acts of phonetic reading, whether of Greek, or Latin, or En-
glish texts such as this one. But the purely consonantal structure
of the Hebrew writing system rendered this participation—the cre-
ative interaction between the reader and the text—particularly con-
scious and overt. It simply could not be taken for granted, or
forgotten. Indeed, the willful engagement with the text that was ne-
cessitated by the absence of written vowels lent a deeply interactive
or interpretive character to the Jewish community’s understanding of
its own most sacred teachings. The scholar Barry Holtz alludes to
this understanding in his introduction to a book on the sacred texts
of Judaism:

We tend usually to think of reading as a passive occupation, but
for the Jewish textual tradition, it was anything but that. Reading
‘was a passionate and active grappling with God’s living word. It
held the challenge of uncovering secret meanings, unheard-of ex-
planations, matters of great weight and significance. An active,
indeed interactive, reading was their method of approaching the
sacred text called Torah and through that reading process of
finding something at once new and very old....

244 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

By “interactive” I mean to suggest that for the rabbis of the
tradition, Torah called for a living and dynamic response. The
great texts in turn are the record of that response, and each text in
turn becomes the occasion for later commentary and interaction.
The Torah remains unendingly alive because the readers of each
subsequent generation saw it as such, taking the holiness of
Torah seriously, and adding their own contribution to the story.
For the tradition, Torah demands interpretation.*

The reader, that is, must actively respond to the Torah, must
bring his own individual creativity into dialogue with the teachings
in order to reveal new and unsuspected nuances. The Jewish people
must enter into dialogue with the received teachings of their ances-
tors, questioning them, struggling with them. The Hebrew Bible
is not a set of finished stories and unchanging laws; it is not a sta-
tic body of dogmatic truths but a living enigma that must be
questioned, grappled with, and interpreted afresh in every genera-
tion. For, as it is said, the guidance that the Torah can offer in one
generation is very different from that which it waits to offer in
another.

This ongoing tradition of textual interpretation and commentary,
and of commentary upon earlier commentary, has given rise to the
numerous postbiblical texts of the Jewish tradition, from the Mish-
nah, the Talmud, and the collections of midrash, to the Zohar and
other Kabbalistic works. Collectively, all these texts are known as the
“Oral Torah,” since they all originated in oral discussion and com-
mentary upon the “Written Torah,” upon the teachings ostensibly
revealed to Moses, the first Jewish scribe, atop Mount Sinai. The
process of writing down oral commentaries and interpretations,
with the intent of preserving them, began in the second or third cen-
tury CE.

The first of such compilations, the Talmud, is today printed with
the primary layer of text, the Mishnah, in the center of each page,
and with subsequent commentaries upon that text arrayed around
it—in successive layers, as it were. Thus, in its visible arrangement
the Talmud displays a sense of the written text not as a definitive
and finished object but as an organic, open-ended process to be en-
tered into, an evolving being to be confronted and engaged.

The Forgetting and Remembering of the Air 245

The Power of Letters

Yet this sense of the written text as an animate, living mystery is
nowhere more explicit than in the Kabbalah, the esoteric tradition of
Jewish mysticism. For here it is not just the text as a whole but the
very letters that are thought to be alive! Each letter of the aleph-beth
is assumed by the Kabbalists to have its own personality, its own
profound magic, its own way of organizing the whole of existence
around itself. Because the written commandments were ostensibly
dictated to Moses directly by God on Mount Sinai, so the written
letters comprising that first Hebrew text—the twenty-two letters of
the aleph-beth—are assumed to be the visible traces of divine utter-
ance. Indeed, some Kabbalists claimed that it was by first generating
the twenty-two letters, and then combining them into such utter-
ances as “Let there be light,” that God spoke the visible universe it-
self into existence. The letters, that is, are sensible concretions of the
very powers of creation.**

By meditating, when reading, not upon the written phrases, or
even upon the words, but upon the individual letters that gaze out at
him from the surface of the page, the Jewish mystic could enter into
direct contact with the divine energies. By combining and permutat-
ing the letters of particular phrases and words until the words them-
selves lost all evident meaning and only the letters stood forth in
all their naked intensity, the Kabbalist was able to bring himself
into increasingly exalted states of consciousness, awakening creative
powers that previously lay dormant within his body.*5 Sometimes,
when the practitioner was reading in this concentrated and magical
fashion, “the letters sprang to life of their own accord,” and began
“speaking” directly to the mystic. At least one practitioner was
alarmed to see the written letters expanding “to the size of moun-
tains” before his eyes. Others reported that, after combining and re-
combining the letters, they saw the letters suddenly take wing and
fly forth from the surface of the page!*°

A close acquaintance with the living letters, and a working knowl-
edge of their individual energies, was assumed to give the Kabbalist
magical abilities with which to ease suffering, illness, and discord in

246 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

the world about him. The Kabbalists, in other words, considered the
aleph-beth to be a highly concentrated and divine form of magic;
therefore, they consciously cultivated their synaesthetic participa-
tion with the written letters.*”

Since the letters of the aleph-beth also at times served as numbers
for the Hebrew people (with the first letter, aleph, signifying the
number 1, the second letter, beth, the number 2, on up through 10,
and with other letters signifying 20, 30, 40, etc., and still others
signifying 100, 200, 300, and 400), written words and phrases could
also be compared by calculating the total numerical value of the let-
ters that comprise them—a Kabbalistic technique called gematria.
Through both permutating the letters and calculating their numeri-
cal values, mystics were able to demonstrate hidden equivalences
and correspondences between various words and names contained
in the scripture. Elohim, for instance, one of the most sacred names
of God in the Hebrew Bible, could be shown to have the same nu-
merical value as the Hebrew word for nature, hateva—evidence of
the hidden unity of God and nature. (Such pantheistic notions
equating God with nature—common to many practitioners of Kab-
balah—would startle the various environmentalists today who
charge that Hebraic religion expelled all divinity from the natural
world.)

Indeed, all the diverse names of God in the Hebrew Bible, and
the letters that comprise them, figure prominently in Kabbalistic
theory, providing essential clues for the practitioner who seeks direct
experience of the divine. Supreme among these names is the Tetra-
grammaton, the four-letter name, YHWH. Often written, in non-
Hebrew texts, as Yahweh, the true manner of pronouncing this most
powerful combination of letters is said to have been forgotten. Nev-
ertheless, some of the most concentrated of Kabbalistic practices in-
volved pronouncing each letter of the Tetragrammaton separately,
combining it, in turn, with each of the five possible breath sounds,
or vowels. A much more elaborate, and presumably dangerous, prac-
tice entailed isolating each letter of the Tetragrammaton and com-
bining it, one at a time, with every other letter of the aleph-beth,
pronouncing each one of these combinations, in turn, with each of
the various vowel sounds.*® By carefully reciting this incantation
over an earthen form in the shape of a human being, it was said that

The Forgetting and Remembering of the Air 247

one could bring the clay figure—a golem—to life. A clue to the sym-
pathetic magic involved in this incantation may be found in the
teaching of the great thirteenth-century Kabbalist Abraham Abu-
lafia, who asserted that the spoker vowels and the written conso-
nants are as interdependent “as the soul and the body.”4? To
combine the vowels—the sounded breath—with the visible conso-
nants was akin to breathing life into a clump of clay, as YHWH had
lent his breath to the earthen Adam.

FINALLY, WE MUST ACKNOWLEDGE THE VAST IMPORTANCE, WITHIN
the Jewish mystical tradition, of the breath itself. In the thirteenth-
century Zohar, the most important of all Kabbalistic texts, the cen-
tral figure, Rabbi Shim’on bar Yohai, insists that the union between
humans and God is best effected through the medium of the breath.
According to Rabbi Shim’on, King Solomon learned from his fa-
ther, King David, the breathing techniques involved in invoking the
holy breath, the inspiration of the divine. “By learning and practic-
ing the secrets inherent in the breath, Solomon could lift nature’s
physical veil from created things and see the spirit within.”°° In a
manner startlingly reminiscent of a Navajo or a Lakota ceremony,
Rabbi Shim’on’s son, El’azar, begins a prayer session by exhorting
“the winds to come from all four directions and fill his breath,” and
instructs his companions to circulate the air inhaled from all four di-
rections interchangeably within their bodies.*! Elsewhere in the
Zohar, one of Rabbi Shim’on’s companions speaks of “the soul-
breath” sent from YHWH to enter the body of the righteous person
at birth. Much like the “wind within one” of the Navajo people, “the
soul-breath that enters at birth directs and trains the human being
and initiates him into every straight path.*? This sense of the breath
as medium between the individual and the divine is exemplified in a
commentary on prayer by a nineteenth-century Hasidic master (Ha-
sidism was a vibrant wave of Jewish mysticism that swept East Eu-
ropean Jewry in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries):

If prayer is pure and untainted,
surely that holy breath
that rises from your lips

248 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

will join with the breath of heaven

that is always flowing

into you from above... .
Thus that part of God

which is within you

is reunited with its source.>?

Yet the sacred breath enters not just into human beings (provid-
ing awareness and guidance), it also animates and sustains the whole
of the sensible world. Like the wind itself, the breath of God per-
meates all of nature. In a classic text entitled “The Portal of Unity
and Faith,” the eighteenth-century Hasidic master Schneur Zalman
of Ladi describes how the syllables and letters of God’s creative
utterances, such as “Let there be light,” or “Let the waters bring
forth swarms of living creatures,” gradually generate, through a
concatenated series of permutations and numerical substitutions,
the exact names, and hence the exact forms, of all natural entities (in
Hebrew a single term, davar, means both “word” and “thing”). Yet
without the continual outflow of God’s breath, which Schneur Zal-
man calls “the Breath of His Mouth,” all of the letters that stand
within the things of this world—all the letter combinations embod-
ied in particular animals, plants, and stones—would return to their
undifferentiated source in the divine Unity, and the sensible world,
along with all sensing beings, would be extinguished. Just as the con-
sonantal letters of a traditional Hebrew text depend, for their com-
municative power, upon the sounded breath that animates them, so
the divine letters and letter combinations that structure the physical
universe are dependent upon the divine breath that continually utters
them forth. All things vibrate with “the Breath of His Mouth.”>*

And it is by virtue of this continual breath that nature is always
new; the world around us is a continual, ongoing utterance! Thus,
the activity of speech, like breathing, links humans not just to God
but to all that surrounds us, from the stones to the sparrows. This is
simply illustrated in another Hasidic commentary on prayer:

See your prayer as arousing the letters
through which heaven and earth
and all living things were created.

The Forgetting and Remembering of the Air 249

The letters are the life of all;
when you pray through them,
all Creation joins with you in prayer.
All that 1s around you can be uplifted;
even the song of a passing bird
may enter into such a prayer.

GIVEN THE SUBTLE IMPORTANCE PLACED UPON THE WIND AND THE
breath within the Hebrew tradition, we may be tempted to wonder
whether, long before the employment of phonetic writing and the
aleph-beth, the monotheism of Abraham and his descendants was
borne by a new way of experiencing the invisible air, a new sense of
the unity of this unseen presence that flows not just within us but
between all things, granting us life and speech even as it moves the
swaying grasses and the gathering clouds. Is it possible that a volatile
power once propitiated as a local storm god came to be generalized,
by one tribe of nomadic herders, into the capricious power of the
encompassing atmosphere itself? We know that the singular mystery
revered by the children of Abraham was an ineffable power that
could not be localized in any visible phenomenon, could not be im-
aged in any idol. Prior to the use of writing by Moses and the later
scribes, however, it may be that this power was not intangible, but
simply invisible—that it was experienced not as an abstract power -
entirely outside of sensuous nature, but as the unseen medium, the
ruach, the ubiquitous wind or spirit that enlivens the visible world.
It is remarkable that the most holy of God’s names, the four-
letter Tetragrammaton, is composed of the most breath-like conso-
nants in the Hebrew aleph-beth (the same three letters, Y, H, and W,
that were sometimes used by ancient scribes to stand in for particu-
lar vowels). The most sacred of God’s names would thus seem to be
the most breath-like of utterances—a name spoken, as it were, by
the wind. Some contemporary students of Kabbalah suggest that
the forgotten pronunciation of the name may have entailed forming
the first syllable, “Y-H,” on the whispered inbreath, and the second
syllable, “W-H,” on the whispered outbreath—the whole name thus
forming a single cycle of the breath. If their suspicion is in any sense
correct, then the awesome mystery invoked by the Tetragrammaton

250 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

may not be separable from the mystery of breathing—this ebb and
flow that ceaselessly binds us to the invisible.

Setting all speculations aside, however, it should be clear from the
foregoing discussion that the strictly consonantal character of the
Hebrew script encouraged a unique relation to the sacred texts, and
to the sacred in general. In particular, the absence of written vowels
fostered (1) a consciously interactive relation with the text—even,
for some, an overtly animistic participation with the written letters
themselves, and (2) a continued respect and reverence for the air—
for the invisible medium that activates the visible letters even as it
animates the visible terrain. While they certainly developed a new,
literate distance from the surrounding world of nature, the He-
brews—the first “People of the Book”—nevertheless retained a pro-
foundly oral relation to the invisible medium of that world, to the
wind and the breath.

The Forgetting of the Air

It is precisely this oral awareness of the invisible depths that enfold
us—this sense of the unseen air as an awesome mystery joining the
human and extrahuman worlds—that was sundered by the Greek
scribes.

When they adapted the ancient Semitic aleph-beth for their own
use, probably in the eighth century B.C.E., the Greek scribes took on
(with modifications) the shapes as well as the names of the early Se-
mitic letters. Yet, as we mentioned in chapter 4, those names had no
extraliterate reference for the Greeks, as they did for the Hebrews.
Remember that for the Hebrews, aleph (Greek: alpha) signified
not just the first letter but also, and more primordially, “ox,” simi-
larly beth (beta) meant “house,” gimmel (gamma) was the word for
“camel,” etc. But to the Greeks, these words named only the letters
themselves; they had no other significance. And as the names of the
letters shed their worldly, extraliterate significance in the transfer
across the Mediterranean, any pictographic resonance between the
written letters and those worldly phenomena (oxen, houses, camels,

The Forgetting and Remembering of the Air 251

etc.) was forgotten as well. In the journey to Greece, in other words,
the letters of the aleph-beth loosened and left behind their vestigial
ties to the enveloping life-world; they thereby became a much more
abstract set of symbols.

- But the Greeks also introduced a strange new element into the al-
phabet, an innovation that would ultimately increase the abstract ca-
pacity of this writing system far more than the above-mentioned
factors. For the Greek scribes introduced written vowels into the
previously consonantal system of letters.

Actually, many of the new letters were adapted from already ex-
isting Semitic letters. Certain characters in the Semitic aleph-beth
signified consonants that had no existence in the Greek language,
and it was these apparently superfluous letters that were appropri-
ated by the Greek scribes to represent vowel sounds. The letter
aleph, for instance, was not a vowel but a consonant in the original
Hebrew usage; it signified the opening of the throat prior to all ut-
terance. Since the Greeks had no use for this consonant, they
adapted this character, which they called alpha, to signify the vowel
sound A. Other Hebrew letters were altered to represent the vowels
E, I, and O. Finally, the Greeks added the letter upsilon, which even-
tually became the Roman letter U.*”

The resulting alphabet was a very different kind of tool from its
earlier, Semitic incarnation—one that would have very different ef-
fects upon the senses that engaged it, and upon the various lan-
guages that adopted it as their own. For the addition of written
vowels enabled a much more thorough transcription of spoken ut-
terance onto the flat surface of the page. A text written with the new
alphabet had none of the ambiguity that, as we have seen, was in-
herent in a traditional Hebrew text. While for any Hebrew text of
sufficient length there were various possible pronunciations, or read-
ings, each of which would yield a slightly different set of words and
meanings, a comparable Greek text would likely admit of only a sin-
gle correct reading. It is thus that texts written with the Greek (and
later the Roman) alphabet did not invite the kind of active and ever-
renewed interpretation that was demanded by the Hebrew texts.
The interactive, synaesthetic participation involved in reading—in
transforming a series of visible marks into a sequence of sounds—
could now become entirely habitual and automatic. For there was no

252 ‘THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

longer any choicein how to sound out the text; all the cues for one’s
participation were spelled out upon the page. Relative to Semitic
texts, then, the Greek texts had a remarkable autonomy—they
seemed to stand, and even to speak, on their own.*8

Yet the apparent precision and efficiency of the new alphabet was
obtained at a high price. For by using visible characters to represent
the sounded breath, the Greek scribes effectively desacralized the
breath and the air. By providing a visible representation of that
which was—by its very nature—invisible, they nullified the mysteri-
ousness of the enveloping atmosphere, negating the uncanniness of
this element that was both here and yet not here, present to the skin
and yet absent to the eyes, immanence and transcendence all at once.

The awesomeness of the air had resided precisely in its ubiqui-
tous and yet unseen nature, its capacity to grant movement and life
to visible nature while remaining, in itself, invisible and ungraspable.
Hebraic writing had preserved this mystery by refraining from rep-
resenting the air itself upon the parchment or the page—by refusing
to image, or objectify, this unseen flux that sustains both the word
and the visible world. By breaking this taboo, by transposing the in-
visible into the register of the visible, the Greek scribes effectively dis-
solved the primordial power of the air.

The effects of this perceptual dissolution were not, of course, ev-
ident all at once. In Greece, as we have seen, the new alphabet met
substantial resistance in the form of a well-developed and flourish-
ing oral culture, and so took several centuries to make itself felt
within the common discourse. As late as the middle of the sixth cen-
tury B.C.E., the Milesian philosopher Anaximenes could still assert:

As the psyché, being air, holds a man together and gives him life,
so breath and air hold together the entire universe and give it
life.5°

A century and a half later, however, when the alphabet was at last
being taught within the educational curriculum and was thereby
spreading throughout Greek culture, Plato and Socrates were able to
co-opt the term psyché—which for Anaximenes was fully associated
with the breath and the air—employing the term now to indicate
something not just invisible but utterly intangible. The Platonic

The Forgetting and Remembering of the Air 253

psyché was not at all a part of the sensuous world, but was rather of
another, utterly non-sensuous dimension. The psyché, that is, was no
longer an invisible yet tangible power continually participant, by
virtue of the breath, with the enveloping atmosphere, but a thor-
oughly abstract phenomenon now enclosed within the physical body
as in a prison.

We have already seen how the new relation that Plato wrote of,
between the immortal psyché and the transcendent realm of eternal
“Tdeas,” was itself dependent upon the new affinity between the lit-
erate intellect and the visible letters (and words) of the alphabet. We
can now discern that this relation between the psyché and the bodi-
less Ideas was dependent, as well, upon a gradual forgetting of the
air and the breath, itself made possible by the spread of the new
technology. For it was only as the unseen air lost its fascination for
the human senses that this other, more extreme invisibility came to
take its place—the utterly incorporeal realm of pure “Ideas,” to
which the Platonic, rational psyché was connected much as the ear-
lier, breathlike psyché was joined to the atmosphere.

‘THOSE WHO SPEAK FACILELY OF A “JUDEO-CHRISTIAN TRADITION”
fail to discern the remarkably different approaches that distinguish
the ancient Jewish and the Christian faiths, differences rooted partly
in the sensorial effects of the very different writing systems em-
ployed by these two highly text-centered traditions. Unlike the
Hebrew Bible, the Christian New Testament was originally written
primarily in the Greek alphabet, and thus the dualistic sensibility
promoted by the Greek writing system was early on allied with
Christian doctrine.*! Under the aegis of the Church, the belief ina
non-sensuous heaven, and in the fundamentally incorporeal nature
of the human soul—ifself “imprisoned,” as Plato had suggested, in
the bodily world—accompanied the alphabet as it spread, first
throughout Europe and later throughout the Americas. And wher-
ever the alphabet advanced, it proceeded by dispelling the air of ghosts
and invisible influences—by stripping the air of its anima, its psychic
depth.

In the oral, animistic world of pre-Christian and peasant Europe,
all things—animals, forests, rivers, and caves—had the power of ex-

254 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

pressive speech, and the primary medium of this collective dis-
course was the air. In the absence of writing, human utterance,
whether embodied in songs, stories, or spontaneous sounds, was in-
separable from the exhaled breath. The invisible atmosphere was
thus the assumed intermediary in all communication, a zone of sub-
tle influences crossing, mingling, and metamorphosing. This invisi-
ble yet palpable realm of whiffs and scents, of vegetative emanations
and animal exhalations, was also the unseen repository of ancestral
voices, the home of stories yet to be spoken, of ghosts and spirited
intelligences—a kind of collective field of meaning from whence in-
dividual awareness continually emerged and into which it continu-
ally receded, with every inbreath and outbreath.

We might say that the air, as the invisible wellspring of the
present, yielded an awareness of transformation and_ transcen-
dence very different from that total transcendence expounded by
the Church. The experiential interplay between the seen and the
unseen—this duality entirely proper to the sensuous life-world—was
far more real, for oral peoples, than an abstract dualism between
sensuous reality as a whole and some other, utterly non-sensuous
heaven.

Thus it was that the progressive spread of Christianity was
largely dependent upon the spread of the alphabet, and, conversely,
that Christian missions and missionaries were by far the greatest fac-
tor in the advancement of alphabetic literacy in both the medieval
and the modern eras. It was not enough to preach the Christian
faith: one had to induce the unlettered, tribal peoples to begin to use
the technology upon which that faith depended. Only by training
the senses to participate with the written word could one hope to
break their spontaneous participation with the animate terrain. Only
as the written text began to speak would the voices of the forest, and of
the river, begin to fade. And only then would language loosen its ancient
association with the invisible breath, the spirit sever itself from the wind,
the psyche dissociate itself from the environing air. The air, once the
very medium of expressive interchange, would become an increas-
ingly empty and unnoticed phenomenon, displaced by the strange
new medium of the written word.

The Forgetting and Remembering of the Air 255

Membranes and Barriers

The progressive forgetting of the air—the loss of the invisible rich-
ness of the present—has been accompanied by a concomitant inter-
nalization of human awareness. We have just seen how the ancient
Greek psyché, or soul, was transformed from a phenomenon associ-
ated with the air and the breath into a wholly immaterial entity
trapped, as it were, within the human body. In contact with the writ-
ten word a new, apparently autonomous, sensibility emerges into ex-
perience, a new self that can enter into relation with its own verbal
traces, can view and ponder its own statements even as it is formu-
lating them, and can thus reflexively interact with itself in isolation
from other persons and from the surrounding, animate earth. This
new sensibility seems independent of the body—seems, indeed, of
another order entirely—since it is borne by the letters and texts
whose changeless quality contrasts vividly with the shifting life of
the body and the flux of organic nature. That this new sensibility
comes to view itself as an isolated intelligence located “inside” the
material body can only be understood in relation to the forgetting of
the air, to the forgetting of this sensuous but unseen medium that
continually flows in and out of the breathing body, binding the sub-
tle depths within us to the fathomless depths that surround us.

We may better comprehend this curious development—the with-
drawal of mind from sensible nature and its progressive incarcera-
tion in the human skull—by considering that every human language
secretes a kind of perceptual boundary that hovers, like a translucent
veil, between those who speak that language and the sensuous ter-
rain that they inhabit. As we grow into a particular culture or lan-
guage, we implicitly begin to structure our sensory contact with the
earth around us in a particular manner, paying attention to certain
phenomena while ignoring others, differentiating textures, tastes,
and tones in accordance with the verbal contrasts contained in the
language. We simply cannot take our place within any community of
human speakers without ordering our sensations in a common man-
ner, and without thereby limiting our spontaneous access to the wild
world that surrounds us. Any particular language or way of speaking

256 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

thus holds us within a particular community of human speakers
only by invoking an ephemeral border, or boundary, between our
sensing bodies and the sensuous earth.

Nevertheless, the perceptual boundary constituted by any lan-
guage may be exceedingly porous and permeable. Indeed, for many
oral, indigenous peoples, the boundaries enacted by their languages
are more like permeable membranes binding the peoples to their
particular terrains, rather than barriers walling them off from the
land. By affirming that the other animals have their own languages,
and that even the rustling of leaves in an oak tree or an aspen grove
is itself a kind of voice, oral peoples bind their senses to the shift-
ing sounds and gestures of the local earth, and thus ensure that
their own ways of speaking remain informed by the life of the land.
Still, the membrane enacted by their language is felt, and is ac-
knowledged as a margin of danger and magic,-a place where the re-
lations between the human and the more-than-human worlds must
be continually negotiated. The shamans common to oral cultures
dwell precisely on this margin or edge; the primary role of such ma-
gicians, as I suggested at the outset of this book, is to act as inter-
mediaries between the human and more-than-human realms. By
regularly shedding the sensory constraints induced by a common
language, periodically dissolving the perceptual boundary in order
to directly encounter, converse, and bargain with various nonhu-
man intelligences—with otter, or owl, or eland—and then rejoining
the common discourse, the shaman keeps the human discourse
from rigidifying, and keeps the perceptual membrane fluid and po-
rous, ensuring the greatest possible attunement between the human
community and the animate earth, between the familiar and the
fathomless.

The emergence or adoption of a formal writing system signifi-
cantly solidifies the ephemeral perceptual boundary already estab-
lished by a common tongue; now the spoken language has a visible
counterpart that floats, fixed and immobile, between the human
body and the sensuous world. Yet while formal writing thus solidi-
fies the linguistic-perceptual boundary, many ancient writing sys-
tems implicitly refer the human senses to that which lies beyond the
boundary; their often pictorially derived characters cannot help but
remind the reading body of its inherence in a more-than-human

The Forgetting and Remembering of the Air 257

field of animate forms. Language is not, here, a purely human pos-
session—it remains tied, however distantly, to the larger field of ex-
pressive powers.

The advent of phonetic writing further rigidifies the perceptual
boundary enclosing the human community. For the written charac-
ters no longer depend, implicitly, upon the larger field of sensuous
phenomeng; they refer, instead, to a strictly human set of sounds.
The letters, as we have said, begin to function as mirrors reflecting
the human community back upon itself. Nevertheless, even this mir-
rored boundary may remain somewhat open to what lies beyond it.
Wehave seen that in the original aleph-beth the vowels, or rather the
absence of vowels, provided the pores, the openings in the linguistic
membrane through which the invisible wind—the living breath—
could still flow between the human and the more-than-human
worlds.

It was only with the plugging of these last pores—with the inser-
tion of visible letters for the vowels themselves—that the perceptual
boundary established by the common language was effectively
sealed, and what had once been a porous membrane became an im-
penetrable barrier, a hall of mirrors. The Greek scribes, that is,
transformed the breathing boundary between human culture and
the animate earth into a seamless barrier segregating a pure inside
from a pure outside. With the addition of written vowels—with the
filling of those gaps, or pores, in the early alphabet—human lan-
guage became a largely self-referential system closed off from the
larger world that once engendered it. And the “I,” the speaking self,
was hermetically sealed within this new interior.

Today the speaking self looks out at a purely “exterior” nature
from a purely “interior” zone, presumably located somewhere inside
the physical body or brain. Within alphabetic civilization, virtually
every human psyche construes itself as just such an individual “inte-
rior,” a private “mind” or “consciousness” unrelated to the other
“minds” that surround it, or to the environing earth. For there is no
longer any common medium, no reciprocity, no respiration between
the inside and the outside. There is no longer any flow between the
self-reflexive damain of alphabetized awareness and all that exceeds,
or subtends, this determinate realm. Between consciousness and the
unconscious. Between civilization and the wilderness.

258 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

Remembering

In the world of modernity the air has indeed become the most taken-
for-granted of phenomena. Although we imbibe it continually, we
commonly fail to notice that there is anything there. We refer to the
unseen depth between things—between people, or trees, or clouds—
as mere empty space. The invisibility of the atmosphere, far from
leading us to attend to it more closely, now enables us to neglect it
entirely. Although we are wholly dependent upon its nourishment
for all of our actions and all our thoughts, the immersing medium
has no mystery for us, no conscious influence or meaning. Lacking
all sacredness, stripped of all spiritual significance, the air is today
little more than a conveniently forgotten dump site for a host of
gaseous effluents and industrial pollutants. Our fascination is else-
where, carried by all these other media—these newspapers, radio
broadcasts, television networks, computer bulletin boards—all these
fields or channels of strictly human communication that so readily
grab our senses and mold our thoughts once our age-old participa-
tion with the original, more-than-human medium has been sun-
dered.

As achild, growing up on the outskirts of New York City, I often
gazed at great smokestacks billowing dark clouds into the sky. Yet I
soon stopped wondering where all that sooty stuff went: since the
adults who decided such things saw fit to dispose of wastes in this
manner, it must, I concluded, be all right. Later, while learning to
drive, I would watch with some alarm as the trucks roaring past me
on the highway spewed black smoke from their gleaming exhaust
pipes, but I quickly forgave them, remembering that my car, too, of-
fered its hot fumes to the air. Everybody did it. As the vapor trails
from the jets soaring overhead seemed to disperse, perfectly, into the
limitless blue, so we assumed that these wastes, these multicolored
smokes and chemical fumes, would all cancel themselves, somehow,
in the invisible emptiness.

It was as though after the demise of the ancestral, pagan gods,
Western civilization’s burnt offerings had become ever more con-
stant, more extravagant, more acrid—as though we were petitioning

The Forgetting and Remembering of the Air 259

some unknown and slumbering power, trying to stir some vast
dragon, striving to invoke some unknown or long-forgotten power
that, awakening, might call us back into relation with something
other than ourselves and our own designs.

Indeed, the outpouring of technological by-products and pollu-
tants since the Industrial Revolution could go on only so long before
it would begin to alter the finite structure of the world around us,
before its effects would begin to impinge upon our breathing bodies,
inexorably drawing us back to our senses and our sensorial contact
with the animate earth.

Today the technological media—the newspapers and radios and
televisions—are themselves beginning to acknowledge and call at-
tention to the changes underway in the air itself. It is through these
secondary media that we recently learned of the massive buildup in
the upper atmosphere of manufactured chemical compounds that
every year burn an ever-widening hole in the stratospheric ozone
layer above Antarctica, while thinning the rest of that protective
layer worldwide. From these media we also learn of the drastic in-
crease in atmospheric carbon dioxide since the onset of the Indus-
trial Revolution, and we hear over and again that this surfeit of
carbon dioxide, along with other heat-absorbing gases, is already
promoting a substantial warming of the earthly climate, a change
which in turn endangers the survival of numerous ecosystems, nu-
merous animal and plant species already stressed, many to the edge
of extinction, by the ever-burgeoning human population.

Nevertheless, such published and broadcast information, reach-
ing us as it does through these technological channels, all too often
remains an abstract cluster of statistics; it does little to alter our in-
tellectual detachment from the sensuous earth until, returning from
a journey, we see for ourselves the brown haze that now settles over
the town where we live, until we feel the chemical breeze stinging
the moist membranes that line our nose, or until we watch, with
alarm, as gale-force winds rip the awning off our storefront. Or per-
haps, after recovering from our fifth fevered illness in a single win-
ter, we realize that our bodily resistance has been dampened by the
increased radiation that daily pours through the exhausted sky, or
by airborne fallout from the latest power-plant failure across the
continent.

260 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

Phenomenologically considered—experientially considered—the
changing atmosphere is not just one component of the ecological
crisis, to be set alongside the poisoning of thé waters, the rapid ex-
tinction of animals and plants, the collapse of complex ecosystems,
and other human-induced horrors. All of these, to be sure, are inter-
connected facets of an astonishing dissociation—a monumental for-
getting of our human inherence in a more-than-human world. Yet
our disregard for the very air that we breathe is in some sense the
most profound expression of this oblivion. For it is the air that most
directly envelops us; the air, in other words, is that element that we
are most intimately zm. As long as we experience the invisible depths
that surround us as empty space, we will be able to deny, or re-
press, our thorough interdependence with the other animals, the
plants, and the living land that sustains us. We may acknowledge, in-
tellectually, our body’s reliance upon those plants and animals that
we consume as nourishment, yet the civilized mind still feels itself
somehow separate, autonomous, independent of the body and of
bodily nature in general. Only as we begin to notice and to experi-
ence, once again, our immersion in the invisible air do we start to re-
call what it is to be fully a part of this world.°?

For the primordial affinity between awareness and the invisible
air simply cannot be avoided. As we become conscious of the unseen
depths that surround us, the inwardness or interiority that we have
come to associate with the personal psyche begins to be encountered
in the world at large: we feel ourselves enveloped, immersed, caught
up within the sensuous world. This breathing landscape is no longer
just a passive backdrop against which human history unfolds, but a
potentized field of intelligence in which our actions participate. As
the regime of self-reference begins to break down, as we awaken to
the air, and to the multiplicitous Others that are implicated, with us,
in its generative depths, the shapes around us seem to awaken, to
come alive. ...

Coda:
Turning Inside Out

Ah, not to be cut off,
not through the slightest partition
shut out from the law of the stars.

The inner—what is it?

if not intensified sky,

hurled through with birds and deep
with the winds of homecoming.

—RAINER MariA RILKE

OT TO BE CUT OFF, AS RILKE SAYS. AND YET WE SEEM,

today, so estranged from the stars, so utterly cut off from

the world of hawk and otter and stone. This book has
traced some of the ways whereby the human mind came to renounce
its sensuous bearings, isolating itself from the other animals and the
animate earth. By writing these pages I have hoped, as well, to renew
some of those bearings, to begin to recall and reestablish the rooted-
ness of human awareness in the larger ecology.

Each chapter has disclosed the subtle dependence of various “in-
terior,” mental phenomena upon certain easily overlooked or taken-
for-granted aspects of the surrounding sensuous world. Language
was disclosed as a profoundly bodily phenomenon, sustained by the
gestures and sounds of the animate landscape. The rational intellect

261

262 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

so prized in the West was shown to rely upon the external, visible
letters of the alphabet. The presumably interior, mental awareness
of the “past” and the “future” was shown to be dependent upon our
sensory experience of that which is hidden beneath the ground
and concealed beyond the horizon. Finally, the experience of aware-
ness itself was related to mysteries of the breath and the air, to the
tangible but invisible atmosphere in which we find ourselves im-
mersed.

The human mind is not some otherworldly essence that comes to
house itself inside our physioiogy. Rather, it is instilled and pro-
voked by the sensorial field itself, induced by the tensions and par-
ticipations between the human body and the animate earth. The
invisible shapes of smells, rhythms of cricketsong, and the move-
ment of shadows all, in a sense, provide the subtle body of our
thoughts. Our own reflections, we might say, are a part of the play of
light and 7ts reflections. “The inner—what is it, if not intensified
sky?”

By acknowledging such links between the inner, psychological
world and the perceptual terrain that surrounds us, we begin to turn
inside-out, loosening the psyche from its confinement within a
strictly human sphere, freeing sentience to return to the sensible
world that contains us. Intelligence is no longer ours alone but is a
property of the earth; we are in it, of it, immersed in its depths. And
indeed each terrain, each ecology, seems to have its own particular
intelligence, its unique vernacular of soil and leaf and sky.

Each place its own mind, its own psyche. Oak, madrone, Douglas
fir, red-tailed hawk, serpentine in the sandstone, a certain scale to
the topography, drenching rains in the winter, fog off-shore in the
summer, salmon surging in the streams—all these together make up
a particular state of mind, a place-specific intelligence shared by all
the humans that dwell therein, but also by the coyotes yapping in
those valleys, by the bobcats and the ferns and the spiders, by all be-
ings who live and make their way in that zone. Each place its own
psyche. Each sky its own blue.

THE SENSE OF BEING IMMERSED IN A SENTIENT WORLD IS
preserved in the oral stories and songs of indigenous peoples—in the

Coda: Turning Inside Out 263

belief that sensible phenomena are all alive and aware, in the as-
sumption that all things have the capacity of speech. Language, for
oral peoples, is not a human invention but a gift of the land itself.

I do not deny that human language has its uniqueness, that from
a certain perspective human discourse has little in common with the
sounds and signals of other animals, or with the rippling speech of
the river. I wish simply to remember that this was not the perspec-
tive held by those who first acquired, for us, the gift of speech.
Human language evolved in a thoroughly animistic context; it nec-
essarily functioned, for many millennia, not only as a means of com-
munication between humans, but as a way of propitiating, praising,
and appeasing the expressive powers of the surrounding terrain.
Human language, that is, arose not only as a means of attunement
between persons, but also between ourselves and the animate land-
scape. The belief that meaningful speech is a purely human prop-
erty was entirely alien to those oral communities that first evolved
our various ways of speaking, and by holding to such a belief today
we may well be inhibiting the spontaneous activity of language. By
denying that birds and other animals have their own styles of
speech, by insisting that the river has no real voice and that the
ground itself is mute, we stifle our direct experience. We cut our-
selves off from the deep meanings in many of our words, severing
our language from that which supports and sustains it. We then
wonder why we are often unable to communicate even among our-
selves.

IN ELUCIDATING THE PROCESS WHEREBY CIVILIZATION HAS TURNED
in upon itself, isolating itself from the breathing earth, I have con-
centrated upon the curious perceptual and linguistic transforma-
tions made possible by the advent of formal writing systems, and in
particular by the advent of phonetic writing. I do not, however, wish
to imply that writing was the sole factor in this process—a complex
process that, after all, has been under way for several thousand
years. Many other factors could have been chosen. I have hardly al-
luded, in this work, to the emergence of agriculture at the dawn of
the Neolithic era, although the spread of agricultural techniques
radically transformed the experienced relation between humans and

264 ‘THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

other species. Nor have I addressed the development of formal
numbering systems, and the consequent influence of numerical
measurement, and quantification, upon our interactions with the
land. And of course I have said little or nothing regarding the count-
less technologies spawned by alphabetic civilization itself, from
telephones to televisions, from automobiles to antibiotics. By
concentrating upon the written word, I have wished to demonstrate
less a particular thesis than a particular stance, a particular way of
pondering and of questioning any factor that one might choose.

It is a way of thinking that strives for rigor without forfeiting our
animal kinship with the world around us—an attempt to think in ac-
cordance with the senses, to ponder and reflect without severing our
sensorial bond with the owls and the wind. It is a style of thinking,
then, that associates truth not with static fact, but with a quality of
relationship.

Ecologically considered, it is not primarily our verbal statements
that are “true” or “false,” but rather the kind of relations that we
sustain with the the rest of nature. A human community that lives in
a mutually beneficial relation with the surrounding earth is a com-
munity, we might say, that lives in truth. The ways of speaking com-
mon to that community—the claims and beliefs that enable such
reciprocity to perpetuate itself—are, in this important sense, true.
They are in accord with a right relation between these people and
their world. Statements and beliefs, meanwhile, that foster violence
toward the land, ways of speaking that enable the impairment or ru-
ination of the surrounding field of beings, can be described as false
ways of speaking—ways that encourage an unsustainable relation
with the encompassing earth. A civilization that relentlessly destroys
the living land it inhabits is not well acquainted with truth, regard-
less of how manysupposed facts it has amassed regarding the calcu-
lable properties of its world.

Hence I am less concerned with the “literal” truth of the asser-
tions that I have made in this work than I am concerned with the
kind of relationships that they make possible. “Literal truth” is en-
tirely an artifact of alphabetic literacy: to be Jiterally true originally
meant to be true to “the letter of scripture”’—to “the letter of the
law.” In this work I have tried to reacquaint the reader with a mode
of awareness that precedes and underlies the literate intellect, to a

Ceda: Turning Inside Out 265

way of thinking and speaking that strives to be faithful not to the
written record but to the sensuous world itself, and to the other bod-
ies or beings that surround us.

For such an oral awareness, to explain is not to present a set of fin-
ished reasons, but to tell a story. That is what I have attempted in
these pages. It is an unfinished story, told from various angles,
sketchy in some parts, complete with gaps and questions and unreal-
ized characters. But it is a story, nonetheless, not a wholly determi-
nate set of facts.

Of course, not all stories are successful. There are good stories
and mediocre stories and downright bad stories. How are they to be
judged? If they do not aim at a static or “literal” reality, how can we
discern whether one telling of events is any better or more worthy
than another? The answer is this: a story must be judged according
to whether it makes sense. And “making sense” must here be under-
stood in its most direct meaning: to make sense is to enliven the
senses. A story that makes sense is one that stirs the senses from their
slumber, one that opens the eyes and the ears to their real surround-
ings, tuning the tongue to the actual tastes in the air and sending
chills of recognition along the surface of the skin. To make sense is to
release the body from the constraints imposed by outworn ways of
speaking, and hence to renew and rejuvenate one’s felt awareness of
the world. It is to make the senses wake up to where they are.

THE APPARENTLY AUTONOMOUS, MENTAL DIMENSION ORIGINALLY
opened by the alphabet—the ability to interact with our own signs in
utter abstraction from our earthly surroundings—has today blos-
somed into a vast, cognitive realm, a horizonless expanse of virtual
interactions and encounters. Our reflective intellects inhabit a global
field of information, pondering the latest scenario for the origin of
the universe as we absently fork food into our mouths, composing
presentations for the next board meeting while we sip our coffee or
cappuccino, clicking on the computer and slipping into cyberspace
in order to network with other bodiless minds, exchanging informa-
tion about gene sequences and military coups, “conferencing” to
solve global environmental problems while oblivious to the moon
rising above the rooftops. Our nervous system synapsed to the ter-

266 ‘THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

minal, we do not notice that the chorus of frogs by the nearby stream
has dwindled, this year, to a solitary voice, and that the song spar-
rows no longer return to the trees.

In contrast to the apparently unlimited, global character of the
technologically mediated world, the sensuous world—the world of
our direct, unmediated interactions—is always local. The sensuous
world is the particular ground on which we walk, the air we breathe.
For myself as I write this, it is the moist earth of a half-logged island
off the northwest coast of North America. It is this dark and stone-
rich soil feeding the roots of cedars and spruces, and of the alders
that rise in front of the cabin, their last leaves dangling from the
branches before being flung into the sky by the early winter storms.
And it is the salty air that pours in through the loose windows,
spiced with cedar and seaweed, and sometimes a hint of diesel fumes
from a boat headed south tugging a giant raft of clear-cut tree
trunks. Sometimes, as well, there is the very faint, fishy scent of otter
scat. Each day a group of otters slips out of the green waters onto the
nearby rocks at high tide, one or two adults and three smaller, sleek
bodies, at least one of them dragging a half-alive fish between its
teeth. The otters, too, breathe this wild air, and when the storm
winds batter the island, they stretch their necks into the invisible
surge, drinking large drafts from the tumult.

In the interior of this island, in the depths of the forest, things are
quieter. Huge and towering powers stand there, unperturbed by the
winds, their crusty bark fissured with splitting seams and crossed by
lines of ants, inchworms, and beetles of varied shapes and hues. A
single woodpecker is thwacking a trunk somewhere, the percussive
rhythm reaching my ears without any echo, absorbed by the mosses
and the needles heavy with water drops that have taken hours to
slide down the trunks from the upper canopy (each drop lodging it-
self in successive cracks and crevasses, gathering weight from subse-
quent drips, then slipping down, past lichens and tiny spiders, to the
next protruding ridge or branch). Fallen firs and hemlocks, and an
old spruce tree tunneled by termites, lie dank and rotting in the
ferns, the jumbled branches of the spruce blocking the faint deer
trail that I follow.

The deer on this island have recently molted, forsaking their
summer fur for a thicker, winter coat. I watch them in the old or-

Coda: Turning Inside Out 267

chard at dusk. No longer the warm brown color of sunlight on soil,
their fur is now grey against the shadowed trunks and the all-grey
sky. These quiet beings seem entirely a part of this breathing terrain,
their very texture and color shifting with the local seasons.

Human persons, too, are shaped by the places they inhabit, both
individually and collectively. Our bodily rhythms, our moods, cycles
of creativity and stillness, and even our thoughts are readily engaged
and influenced by shifting patterns in the land. Yet our organic at-
tunement to the local earth is thwarted by our ever-increasing inter-
course with our own signs. Transfixed by our technologies, we
short-circuit the sensorial reciprocity between our breathing bodies
and the bodily terrain. Human awareness folds in upon itself, and
the senses—once the crucial site of our engagement with the wild
and animate earth—become mere adjuncts of an isolate and abstract
mind bent on overcoming an organic reality that now seems dis-
turbingly aloof and arbitrary.

The alphabetized intellect stakes its claim to the earth by staking
it down, extends its dominion by drawing a grid of straight lines and
right angles across the body of a continent—across North America,
across Africa, across Australia—defining states and provinces, coun-
ties and countries with scant regard for the oral peoples that already
live there, according to a calculative logic utterly oblivious to the life
of the land.

If I say that I live in the “United States” or in “Canada,” in
“British Columbia” or in “New Mexico,” I situate myself within a
purely human set of coordinates. I say very little or nothing about
the earthly place that I inhabit, but simply establish my temporary
location within a shifting matrix of political, economic, and civiliza-
tional forces struggling to maintain themselves, today, largely at the
expense of the animate earth. The great danger is that I, and many
other good persons, may come to believe that our breathing bodies
really inhabit these abstractions, and that we will lend our lives more
to consolidating, defending, or bewailing the fate of these ephemeral
entities than to nurturing and defending the actual places that phys-
ically sustain us.

The land that includes us has its own articulations, its own con-
tours and rhythms that must be acknowledged if the land is to
breathe and to flourish. Such patterns, for instance, are those traced

268 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

by rivers as they wind their way to the coast, or by a mountain range
that rises like a backbone from the plains, its ridges halting the pas-
sage of clouds that gather and release their rains on one side of the
range, leaving the other slope dry and desertlike. Another such con-
tour is the boundary between two very different kinds of bedrock
formed by some cataclysmic event in the story of a continent, or be-
tween two different soils, each of which invites a different popula-
tion of plants and trees to take root. Diverse groups of animals
arrange themselves within such subtle boundaries, limiting their
movements to the terrain that affords them their needed foods and
the necessary shelter from predators. Other, more migratory species
follow such patterns as they move with the seasons, articulating
routes and regions readily obscured by the current human overlay of
nations, states, and their various subdivisions. Only when we slip be-
neath the exclusively human logic continually imposed upon the
earth do we catch sight of this other, older logic at work in the world.
Only as we come close to our senses, and begin to trust, once again,
the nuanced intelligence of our sensing bodies, do we begin to notice
and respond to the subtle logos of the land.

There is an intimate reciprocity to the senses; as we touch the
bark of a tree, we feel the tree touching us, as we lend our ears to the
local sounds and ally our nose to the seasonal scents, the terrain
gradually tunes us in in turn. The senses, that is, are the primary
way that the earth has of informing our thoughts and of guiding our
actions. Huge centralized programs, global initiatives, and other
“top down” solutions will never suffice to restore and protect the
health of the animate earth. For it 1s only at the scale of our direct, sen-
sory interactions with the land around us that we can appropriately no-
tice and respond to the immediate needs of the living world.

Yet at the scale of our sensing bodies the earth is astonishingly, ir-
reducibly diverse. It discloses itself to our senses not as a uniform
planet inviting global principles and generalizations, but as this
forested realm embraced by water, or a windswept prairie, or a
desert silence. We can know the needs of any particular region only
by participating in its specificity—by becoming familiar with its cy-
cles and styles, awake and attentive to its other inhabitants.

Coda: Turning Inside Out 269

OF COURSE, THE INTENSELY PLACE-CENTERED CHARACTER OF THE
older, oral cultures was not without its drawbacks. Exquisitely inte-
grated into their surrounding ecologies, indigenous, oral cultures
were often so bound to their specific terrains that other, neighboring
ecologies—other patterns of flora, fauna, and climate—could seem
utterly incongruous, threatening, even monstrous. While such un-
canniness may have helped to limit territorial incursions into neigh-
boring bioregions, and thus may have minimized the potential for
intertribal conflict, still there were times when human bands were
displaced from their familiar lands—whether by climatic changes,
by changes in the migration routes of prey, or simply by acci-
dent—and suddenly found themselves in a world where their ritual
gestures, their prayers, and their stories seemed to lose all meaning,
where the shapes of the landforms lacked coherence, where nothing
seemed to make sense.

Without a set of stories and songs appropriate to the new sur-
roundings, without an etiquette matched to this land and its specific
affordances of food, fuel, and shelter, the displaced and often fright-
ened newcomers could easily disrupt and even destroy a large part
of the biotic community. The extinctions of various large animals
that occurred immediately after migrating humans first crossed the
Bering Strait and spread throughout North and South America may
well have been precipitated by just such a situation—by a lack of
cultural and linguistic patterns tuned to the diverse ecologies of this
continent. A similar wave of extinctions appears to have occurred
much earlier, during the first centuries of human incursion into
Australia, while other extinctions have marked the arrival of our
species in various island ecologies, including New Zealand, Hawaii,
and Madagascar.! Such events suggest that the deep attunement to
place characteristic of so many oral peoples emerges only after sev-
eral generations in one general terrain.

It is also evident that encounters between human groups from
entirely different bioregions could at times precipitate violence—in
some cases quite bloody violence—merely as a result of the incom-
mensurability of cultural universes and the consequent terror that
each group might induce in the other. Such considerations must lead
us to wonder whether the strange sense of human commonality
made possible by the spread of formal writing systems is not some-

270 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

thing very worthy after all. Is there not something terrifically valu-
able about the modern faith in human equality? Although achieved
at the cost of our cultural attunement to the particular places we in-
habit, is there not something wondrous about the spreading recogni-
tion that we are part of a single, unitary earth?

Perhaps there is. And yet it is a precarious value. For at the very
moment that human populations on every continent have come to
recognize the planet as a unified whole, we discover that so many
other species are rapidly dwindling and vanishing, that the rivers are
choking from industrial wastes, that the sky itself is wounded. At the
very moment that the idea of human equality has finally spread, via
the printed word or the electronic media, into every nation, it be-
comes apparent that it is indeed nothing more than an idea, that in
some of the most “developed” of nations humans are nevertheless
destroying each other, physically and emotionally, in unprecedented
numbers—whether through warfare, through the callousness of cor-
porate greed, or through a rapidly spreading indifference.

Clearly, something is terribly missing, some essential ingredient
has been neglected, some necessary aspect of life has been danger-
ously overlooked, set aside, or simply forgotten in the rush toward a
common world. In order to obtain the astonishing and unifying
image of the whole earth whirling in the darkness of space, humans,
it would seem, have had to relinquish something just as valu-
able—the humility and grace that comes from being fully a part of
that whirling world. We have forgotten the poise that comes from
living in storied relation and reciprocity with the myriad things, the
myriad beings, that perceptually surround us.

Only if we can renew that reciprocity—grounding our newfound
capacity for literate abstraction in those older, oral forms of experi-
ence—only then will the abstract intellect find its real value.” It is
surely not a matter of “going back,” but rather of coming full circle,
uniting our capacity for cool reason with those more sensorial and
mimetic ways of knowing, letting the vision of acommon world root
itself in our direct, participatory engagement with the local and the
particular. If, however, we simply persist in our reflective cocoon,
then all of our abstract ideals and aspirations for a unitary world will
prove horribly delusory. If we do not soon remember ourselves to
our sensuous surroundings, if we do not reclaim our solidarity with

Coda: Turning Inside Out 271

the other sensibilities that inhabit and constitute those surround-
ings, then the cost of our human commonality may be our common
extinction.

Indeed, many persons and communities, both within and outside
of the industrialized nations, are already engaged in such a process
of remembering. Individuals with the most varied backgrounds and
skills—farmers, physicists, poets, professors, herbalists, engineers,
mapmakers—have all been drawn toward the practice that some call
“reinhabitation.” They have begun to apprentice themselves to their
particular places, to the ecological regions they inhabit. Many, for
instance, have become careful students of the plants and trees that
grow in their terrain, learning each plant’s nutritive and/or medici-
nal properties, and its associations with specific insects and animals.
Others have taken as teachers the local animals themselves, spending
their spare time monitoring migrations, or learning the life cycle and
behavior of particular species. They work to restore damaged habi-
tats, and gradually to restore native species that had been locally
eradicated by human recklessness. Working together, they shut
down the factory that pollutes the estuary, and they woo the salmon
back into the streams. In the heart of the city they plant collective
gardens with endemic species, and hold equinox feasts with the
homeless. At every juncture they strive to discern those modes of
human community that are most appropriate to the region, most re-
sponsive and responsible to the earthly surroundings.

In North America this spontaneous and quietly growing move-
ment goes by many names. In truth, it is less a movement than
a common sensibility shared by persons who have, in Robinson
Jeffers’s phrase, “fallen in love outward” with the world around
them. As their compassion for the land deepens, they choose to resist
the contemporary tendency to move always elsewhere for a better
job or more affluent lifestyle, and resolve instead to dedicate them-
selves to the terrain that has claimed them, to meet the generosity of
the land with a kind of wild faithfulness. They rejuvenate their
senses by entering into reciprocity with the sensuous surroundings.
This does not prevent them from engaging in the political realities of
counties and countries, from supporting statewide initiatives and
voting in national elections. They are aware, however, that political
and economic institutions not aligned with earthly realities are not

272 THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

likely to last, that such structures are like ephemeral phantoms to
which we must attend without letting them distract us from what is
really here. Such persons ally themselves not with the ever-expand-
ing human monoculture, nor with the abstract vision of a global
economy, but with the far more sustainable prospect of a regionally
diverse and interdependent web of largely self-sufficient communi-
ties—a multiplicity of technologically sophisticated, vernacular cul-
tures tuned to the structure and pulse of particular places. They
know well that if humankind is to flourish without destroying the
living world that sustains us, then we must grow out of our adoles-
cent aspiration to encompass and control all that is. Sooner or later,
they suspect, our technological ambition must begin to scale itself
down, allowing itself to be oriented by the distinct needs of specific
bioregions. Sooner or later, that is, technological civilization must
accept the invitation of gravity and settle back into the land, its po-
litical and economic structures diversifying into the varied contours
and rhythms of a more-than-human earth.

YET THE PRACTICE OF REALIGNMENT WITH REALITY CAN HARDLY
afford to be utopian. It cannot base itself upon a vision hatched in
our heads and then projected into the future. Any approach to cur-
rent problems that aims us toward a mentally envisioned future im-
plicitly holds us within the oblivion of linear time. It holds us, that
is, within the same illusory dimension that enabled us to neglect and
finally to forget the land around us. By projecting the solution some-
where outside of the perceiveable present, it invites our attention
away from the sensuous surroundings, induces us to dull our senses,
yet again, on behalf of a mental ideal.

A genuinely ecological approach does not work to attain a men-
tally envisioned future, but strives to enter, ever more deeply, into
the sensorial present. It strives to become ever more awake to the
other lives, the other forms of sentience and sensibility that sur-
round us in the open field of the present moment. For the other an-
imals and the gathering clouds do not exist in linear time. We meet
them only when the thrust of historical time begins to open itself
outward, when we walk out of our heads into the cycling life of the
land around us. This wild expanse has its own timing, its rhythms of

Coda: Turning Inside Out 273

dawning and dusk, its seasons of gestation and bud and blossom. It
is here, and not in linear history, that the ravens reside.

Of course, if we live in the thick of the city, or even among the
sprawling malls of suburbia, the sensuous world itself seems to
surge toward a transcendent future, as high-rise buildings spring up
from vacant lots, as wetlands give way to highways and billboard ad-
vertisements become 3-D holograms. Yet this restless progression
takes place only within the encircling horizon of the breathing earth.
New York City remains, first and foremost, an island settlement in
the Hudson River estuary, subject to the coastal weather of that ge-
ography. For all the international commerce that goes on within its
glassy walls, Manhattan could not exist without its grounding amid
the waters with their tidal surges. Meanwhile, the inhabitants of Los
Angeles awaken, often enough, to the trembling power of their own
terrain. To return to our senses is to renew our bond with this wider
life, to feel the soil beneath the pavement, to sense—even when in-
doors—the moon’s gaze upon the roof.

BUT WHAT, THEN, OF WRITING? THE PRECEDING PAGES HAVE CALLED
attention to some unnoticed and unfortunate side-effects of the al-
phabet—effects that have structured much of the way we now per-
ceive. Yet it would be a perilous mistake for any reader to conclude
from these pages that he or she should simply relinquish the written
word. Indeed, the story sketched out herein suggests that the writ-
ten word carries a pivotal magic—the same magic that once sparkled
for us in the eyes of an owl and the glide of an otter.

For those of us who care for an earth not encompassed by ma-
chines, a world of textures, tastes, and sounds other than those that
we have engineered, there can be no question of simply abandoning
literacy, of turning away from all writing. Our task, rather, is that of
taking up the written word, with all of its potency, and patiently,
carefully, writing language back into the land. Our craft is that of re-
leasing the budded, earthly intelligence of our words, freeing them
to respond to the speech of the things themselves—to the green ut-
tering-forth of leaves from the spring branches. It is the practice of
spinning stories that have the rhythm and lilt of the local sound-
scape, tales for the tongue, tales that want to be told, again and again,

274 ‘THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

sliding off the digital screen and slipping off the lettered page to in-
habit these coastal forests, those desert canyons, those whispering
grasslands and valleys and swamps. Finding phrases that place us in
contact with the trembling neck-muscles of a deer holding its antlers
high as it swims toward the mainland, or with the ant dragging a
scavenged rice-grain through the grasses. Planting words, like seeds,
under rocks and fallen logs—letting language take root, once again,
in the earthen silence of shadow and bone and leaf.

AN ALDER LEAF, LOOSENED BY WIND, IS DRIFTING OUT WITH THE
tide. As it drifts, it bumps into the slender leg of a great blue heron
staring intently through the rippled surface, then drifts on. The
heron raises one leg out of the water and replaces it, a single step. As
I watch I, too, am drawn into the spread of silence. Slowly, a bank of
cloud approaches, slipping its bulged and billowing texture over the
earth, folding the heron and the alder trees and my gazing body into
the depths of a vast breathing being, enfolding us all within a com-
mon flesh, a common story now bursting with rain.

Notes

CHAPTER 1: THE ECOLOGY OF MAGIC

1. This work was done at the Philadelphia Association, a therapeutic
community directed by Dr. R. D. Laing and his associates.

2. A simple illustration of this may be found among many of the in-
digenous peoples of North America, for whom the English term “medi-
cine” commonly translates a word meaning “power”—specifically, the
sacred power received by a human person froma particular animal or other
nonhuman entity. Thus, a particular medicine person may be renowned for
her “badger medicine” or “bear medicine,” for his “eagle medicine,” “elk
medicine,” or even “thunder medicine.” It is from their direct engagement
with these nonhuman powers that medicine persons derive their own abil-
ities, including their ability to cure human ailments.

3. To the Western mind such views are likely to sound like reckless
“projections” of human consciousness into inanimate and dumb materials,
suitable for poetry perhaps, but having nothing, in fact, to do with those ac-
tual birds or that forest. Such is our common view. This text will examine
the possibility that it is civilization that has been confused, and not indige-
nous peoples. It will suggest, and provide evidence, that one perceives a
world at all only by projecting oneself into that world, that one makes con-

275

276 Notes to Pages 16-41

tact with things and others only by actively participating in them, lending
one’s sensory imagination to things in order to discover how they alter and
transform that imagination, how they reflect us back changed, how they are
different from us. It will suggest that perception is always participatory,
and hence that modern humanity’s denial of awareness in nonhuman na-
ture is borne not by any conceptual or scientific rigor, but rather by an in-
ability, or a refusal, to fully perceive other organisms.

4. The similarity between such animistic worldviews and the emerg-
ing perspective of contemporary ecology is not trivial. Atmospheric geo-
chemist James Lovelock, elucidating the well-known Gaia hypothesis—a
theory stressing the major role played by organic life in the ceaseless mod-
ulation of the earth’s atmospheric and climatic conditions—insists that the
geological environment is itself constituted by organic life, and by the
products of organic metabolism. In his words, we inhabit “a world that is
the breath and bones of our ancestors.” See, for instance, “Gaia: the World
as Living Organism,” in the New Scientist, December 18, 1986, as well as
Scientists on Gata, ed. Stephen Schneider and Penelope Boston (Cam-
bridge: M.I.T. Press, 1991).

CHAPTER 2: PHILOSOPHY ON THE WAY TO ECOLOGY

1. Galileo Galilei, cited in Edwin Jones, Reading the Book of Nature
(Athens: Ohio University Press, 1989), p. 22.
> in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 10th
ed., signifies “an object or aspect known through the senses rather than

2. “Phenomenon,”

by thought or intuition.” It is commonly contrasted with the term
“noumenon” (from the Greek nooumenon: “that which is apprehended by
thought”—itself derived from the Greek term nous, for “mind”).

3. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin
Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), pp. vili—ix.

4. Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phe-
nomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publish-
ers, 1960). (Husserl completed the original text in 1929.)

5. Edmund Husserl, “Epilogue,” in Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phe-
nomenology II, trans. Richard Rozcewicz and André Schuwer, 1989, p. 421.
The notion of intersubjectivity did not reach the American popular aware-
ness until the 1960s, when various authors began to describe objective real-
ity as the “consensus reality” of the cultural mainstream.

6. Husserl’s notion of the life-world was developed in his last, unfin-
ished book, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenome-

Notes to Pages 42-55 277

nology, written from 1934 to 1937, in the shadow of the impending world
war. As a German Jew, Husserl was denied any public platform from which
to lecture, teach, or publish in his own country; hence, the lectures from
which The Crisis grew were presented on journeys to Vienna and to Prague,
and the first installments of the book were published in Yugoslavia shortly
before Husserl’s death in 1938. The “Crisis” of the title, which he wrote of
as “the loss of science’s meaning for life,” was soon to be exemplified in the
supreme indifference to life of many of Germany’s scientists and medical
doctors as they wrote numerous scientific articles on the biological inferi-
ority of particular races, and later, in the objective and technological effi-
ciency of the death factories at Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald, and
Treblinka. Although the gas chambers are no more, the same crisis—the
same estrangement of a presumably “objective” rationality from living,
sensuous reality—continues today in the reckless poisoning of the waters
and the winds, and the forced extinction of countless forms of life, by a
technological “progress” utterly oblivious to the living world on which it
feeds.

7. Husserl, “Foundational Investigations of the Phenomenological
Origin of the Spatiality of Nature,” trans. Fred Kersten, in Peter Mc-
Cormick and Frederick A. Elliston, eds., Husserl: Shorter Works (Brighton,
Eng.: Harvester Press, 1981).

8. Ibid., p. 227.

9. Ibid., p. 231.

10. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, trans. Richard McCleary
(Evanston, II].: Northwestern University Press, 1964), pp. 180-81.

11. In this chapter I will be intertwining Merleau-Ponty’s conclusions
with my own experiential illustrations of those conclusions. I am less inter-
ested in merely repeating Merleau-Ponty’s insights thirty years after his
death than I am in demonstrating the remarkable usefulness of those in-
sights for a deeply philosophical (and psychological) ecology. While my ex-
plications will at times move beyond the exact content of Merleau-Ponty’s
writings, they are nonetheless inspired by a close and long-standing ac-
quaintance with those writings, and they remain faithful, I trust, to the un-
finished and open-ended character of his thinking.

12. Aristotle, The Politics of Aristotle, trans. E. Barker (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1946), p. 13 (1254b).

13. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 214.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid., p. 317.

16. Ibid., pp. 211-12.

17. Ibid., pp. 320, 322.

278 Notes to Pages 57-76

18. Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, How Natives Think, (reprint, Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 77.

19. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 227.

20. Ibid., p. 229.

21. Ibid., p. 228.

22. Genuine art, we might say, is simply human creation that does not
stifle the nonhuman element but, rather, allows whatever is Other in the
materials to continue to live and to breathe. Genuine artistry, in this sense,
does not impose a wholly external form upon some ostensibly “inert” mat-
ter, but rather allows the form to emerge from the participation and re-
ciprocity between the artist and his materials, whether these materials be
stones, or pigments, or spoken words. Thus understood, art is really a co-
operative endeavor, a work of cocreation in which the dynamism and power
of earth-born materials is honored and respected. In return for this respect,
these materials contribute their more-than-human resonances to human
culture.

23. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans.
Alphonso Lingis, (Evanston, I]1.: Northwestern University Press, 1968).

24. Ibid., p. 127.

25. Richard K. Nelson, Make Prayers to the Raven: A Koyukon View
of the Northern Forest (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983),
p. 14.

26. Ibid., p. 241.

27. Kenneth Lincoln, “Native American Literatures,” in Smoothing the
Ground: Essays on Native American Oral Literature, Brian Swann, ed.,
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), p. 18.

28. Ibid., p. 22.

CHAPTER 3: THE FLESH OF LANGUAGE

1. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 184.

2. Ibid.

3. James M. Edie, introduction to Merleau-Ponty, Consciousness and
the Acquisition of Language (Evanston, IIl.: Northwestern University Press,
1973), p. xviii.

4. Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, trans.
Thomas G. Bergin and Max H. Fisch, 3rd ed. (Garden City, N.Y.: Double-
day & Co., 1961).

5. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Essay on the Origin of Languages,” trans.
John H. Moran; and Johann Gottfried Herder, “Essay on the Origin of

Notes to Pages 77-80 279

”

Language,” trans. Alexander Gode in Rousseau and Herder, On the
Origin of Language (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966). Wilhelm
von Humboldt later took up and extended Herder’s views on language,
contesting the mainstream view of language as an objective and deter-
minate system. He insisted that we must think of language primarily as
speech, and of speech as a dynamic and creative activity, not as a fin-
ished phenomenon—as energeia, not ergon. See Charles Taylor, Human
Agency and Language (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985),
p. 256.

6. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 184.

7. Ample evidence for such a view may be found by studying the pho-
netic texture of particular words. To present a single example: Philoso-
pher Peter Hadreas has sampled the words for “sea” and for “earth” (or
“ground”) in fifteen European and Asian languages currently in use, and
found that the words for “sea” consistently depend upon continuant conso-
nants, while the words for “earth” or “ground” depend upon plosive conso-
nants. (Continuant consonants are those consonants that do not involve a
stoppage of air flow. With such consonants—n, m, ng, s, 2, f, v, h, sh—the
breath is shaped by the vocal organs without being obstructed by them.
Plosives, on the other hand, involve a momentary stoppage of the air flow
and a subsequent, slightly explosive, release. Such are t, d, ch, j, p, b, and g.)
Here is Hadreas’s chart:

language “sea” “earth” or “ground”
French mer terre
Italian mare terra
Spanish mer tierra
German meer erde
Dutch zee aarde
Russian more potshva
Polish morze gleba
Czech more puda
Lithuanian jura padas
Latvian jura augsne
Turkish deniz toprak
Arabic bahar trab
Japanese umi dai chi
Korean hoswu taeji

Chinese hoi tati

280 }#8Notes to Pages 80-86

Hadreas offers this explanation of the findings: “The sea as we move over
or through it does not involve an obstruction of movement; whereas the
earth or ground, at least insofar as it breaks a fall, always does.” Accord-
ingly, the words for “earth” or “ground” all employ plosives, while the
words for “sea” employ only continuants. (Even in the apparent exceptions
of Turkish and Arabic, the words for “sea” are relatively less plosive than
those for “earth.”) See Peter J. Hadreas, In Place of the Flawed Diamond
(New York: Peter Lang Publishers, 1986); pp. 100-102.

8. Although an almost dogmatic insistence upon the arbitrariness of
the relation between linguistic signs and that which they signify has been
common among linguists throughout the twentieth century, several major
researchers have dared to challenge this profoundly dualistic assumption,
and have undertaken careful studies of the implicit significance carried
by particular speech sounds, or “phonemes.” Among those theorists who
have stressed the importance of this layer of meanings immanent in the
speech sounds themselves are the German linguist Hans Georg von der
Gabelentz (1840-93); the French linguist Maurice Grammont
(1866-1946), whose work focused on the evocative significance of the dif-
ferent vowel sounds; the well-known American linguist Edward Sapir
(1884-1939); and Sapir’s correspondent, the outstanding Danish linguist
Otto Jesperson (1860-1943), who accomplished substantial research on the
role of onomatopoeias and “sound symbolism” in the ongoing evolution of
spoken languages (see, for instance, chap. 20 of Jesperson’s book Lan-
guage—Its Nature, Development, and Origin [New York: Henry Holt,
1922]). Finally, I must acknowledge the great Russian investigator of lan-
guages, Roman Jacobson (1896-1982), whose wonderful chapter “The
Spell of Speech Sounds,” from a late book written with Linda R. Waugh
entitled The Sound Shape of Language (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1979), was my initial encounter with the first two linguists men-
tioned above.

9. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 197.

10. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles
Bally and Albert Sechehaye, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: McGraw-
Hill, 1966).

11. Merleau-Ponty, Signs, p. 39.

12. Ibid., pp. 40, 42.

13. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible. See, for instance, the
note on “Perception and Language,” p. 213.

14. Ibid., p. 125.

15. Ibid., p. 194. Compare these well-known lines from Dogen, the
great thirteenth-century Japanese Zen teacher: “That the self advances and

Notes to Pages 86-90 281

realizes the ten thousand things is delusion. That the ten thousand things
advance and realize the self is enlightenment” (from the Genjo Koan by
Dogen).

16. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, p. 155.

17. Merleau-Ponty’s approach to language and to meaning, disclosing
their source in a carnal field of participation that subtends the strictly
human universe of instituted and inert meanings, provides a powerful re-
sponse to the significant challenge posed to Western rationality by the post-
modern “deconstructionist” thinkers. While these theorists aim to effect a
deconstruction of all philosophical foundations, Merleau-Ponty’s work
suggests that, underneath all those admittedly shaky foundations, there re-
mains the actual ground that we stand on, the earthly ground of rock and
soil that we share with the other animals and the plants. This dark source,
to which we can readily point even in the silence, will outlast all our purely
human philosophies as it outlasts all the other artificial structures we erect
upon it. We would do well, then, to keep our thoughts and our theories
close to this nonarbitrary ground that already supports all our cogitations.
The density beneath our feet is a depth we cannot fathom, and it spreads
out on all sides into the horizon, and beyond. Unlike all the human-made
foundations we construct upon its surface, the silent and stony ground it-
self can never be grasped in a purely human act of comprehension. For it
has, from the start, been constituted (or “constructed”) by many organic
entities besides ourselves.

18. See Marcel Griaule, Conversations with Ogotemméli (London: Ox-
ford University Press, 1965), pp. 16-21.

19. See, for instance, Howard Norman, “Crow Ducks and Other Wan-
dering Talk,” in David M. Guss, ed., The Language of the Birds (San Fran-
cisco: North Point Press, 1985), p. 19.

20. Translated by Edward Field, in Jerome and Diane Rothenberg,
eds., Symposium of the Whole (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1983), p. 3.

21. Norman, “Crow Ducks,” p. 20.

22. See, for instance, Richard Nelson, Make Prayers to the Raven: A
Koyukon View of the Northern Forest (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1983).

23. Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, trans.
Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), pp. 96-98.

24. Brian Swann, ed., Smoothing the Ground: Essays on Native Amer-
ican Oral Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983),
p. 28.

25. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, p. 213.

282 Notes to Pages 91-97

26. Edward Sapir, “The Status of Linguistics as a Science,” in David
G. Mandelbaun, ed., Selected Writings of Edward Sapir (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1949), p. 162.

CHAPTER 4: ANIMISM AND THE ALPHABET

1. Perhaps the most influential of such analyses has been historian
Lynn White Jr.’s much-reprinted essay “The Historical Roots of Our Eco-
logic Crisis,” originally published in Science 155 (1967), pp. 1203-1207.

The Genesis quote is from Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures, translated by
the Jewish Publication Society according to the traditional Hebrew text
(Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1985).

2. Jacques Derrida and other theorists have claimed that there is no
self-identical author or subject standing behind any text that one reads, leg-
islating its “actual” meanings; the precise meaning of a text, like its real ori-
gin, can only be indicated by referring to other texts to which this one
responds, and since those, in turn, mark divergences from still other texts,
the clear source, or the true meaning, is always deferred, always elsewhere.
Since neither the origin nor the precise meaning of a text can ever be made
wholly explicit, there can be no real meeting between the reader and the
writer, at least not in the traditional sense of a pure coinciding of one’s
“self” with the exact intention of a supposed “author.”

My equation of “meaning” with “meeting” would seem, at first blush,
to fall easy prey to this critique. Yet Derrida’s critique has bite only if one
maintains that the other who writes is an exclusively human Other, only if
one assumes that the written text is borne by an exclusively human subjec-
tivity. Here, however, I am asserting a homology between the act of reading
and the ancestral, indigenous act of tracking. I am suggesting that that
which lurks behind all the texts that we read is not a human subject but an-
other animal, another shape of awareness (ultimately the otherness of ani-
mate nature itself). The meeting that I speak of, then, is precisely the
encounter with a presence that can never wholly coincide with our own, the
confrontation with an enigma that cannot be dispelled by thought, an oth-
erness that can never be fully overcome.

3. J. Gernet, quoted in Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans.
Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 123.

4. The approximate dates referred toin this paragraph are drawn from
several texts, including Albertine Gaur, A History of Writing (New York:
British Library/Cross River Press, 1992); J. T. Hooker et al., Reading the
Past: Ancient Wniting from Cunetform to the Alphabet (Berkeley: British
Museum/ University of California Press, 1990); and Jack Goody, The Inter-

Notes to Pages 97-98 283

face Between the Written and the Oral (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1987).

5. The written characters or glyphs that I have referred to as ideo-
grams are sometimes called logograms (word signs) by contemporary lin-
guists, in order to emphasize that these characters are regularly used to
transcribe or invoke particular words. The term “logogram,” however,
hides or masks the pictorial element that remains subtly operative in many
of these written characters, and it is for this reason that I, like many others,
have retained the popular terminology. The pictorial, “iconic” nature of
many characters within a script inevitably influences the experience of lan-
guage and linguistic meaning common to those who use that script. In the
Mayan languages, for instance, the words for “writing” and “painting”
were and are the same—the same artisans practiced both crafts, and the pa-
tron deities of both crafts were twin monkey gods. As Dennis Tedlock in-
forms us in his introduction to the Mayan Popol Vuh, “In the books made
under the patronage of these twin gods... the writing not only records
words but sometimes has elements that picture or point to their meaning
without the necessity of a detour through words.” Dennis Tedlock, trans.,
Popul Vuh: The Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1985), p. 30.

6. That the contemporary Chinese word for “writing,” as we saw ear-
lier, also applies to the tracks of animals and the marks on a turtle shell may
well be attributed to the fact that China has retained a somewhat iconic or
pictorially derived mode of writing down to the present day.

7. Jack Goody, The Interface Between the Written and the Oral, pp. 34, 38.

8. It is important to realize that many pictorially derived writing sys-
tems commonly assumed by Western thinkers to be largely ideographic—
like Egyptian hieroglyphs, the Chinese script, and even the recently
deciphered Mayan system—utilize a host of conventional rebuses as pho-
netic indicators in combination with ideographic signs. These phonetic
characters, however, commonly retain pictorial ties to the sensuous world.
Although a hasty reader might choose to read these phonetic symbols with-
out giving thought to their pictorial significance, according to Dennis Ted-
lock “the other meanings were still there for a reader who could see and
hear them—even the same reader perhaps, in a different mood.” A striking
demonstration of the imagistic logic that animates such nonalphabetic
writing systems may be found in the chapter entitled “Eyes and Ears to the
Book” in Tedlock’s remarkable study of Mayan culture, Breath on the Mir-
ror (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993, pp. 109-14).

9. Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word
(New York: Methuen, 1982), pp. 87-88.

284 Notes to Pages 99-104

10. Ibid.

11. J. A. Hawkins, “The Origin and Dissemination of Writing in West-
ern Asia,” in P. R. S. Moorey, ed., Origins of Civilization (London: Oxford
University Press, 1979), p. 132.

12. Ong, p. 89. See also Hooker et al., pp. 210-11; Gaur, p. 87.

13. However, the aleph in the Hebrew aleph-beth does not represent a
vowel sound—rather, it signifies the opening of the throat prior to any sound.

14. Another common version of the early Semitic ‘qoph’ consisted of a
semicircle intersected by a vertical line: -. Linguist Geoffrey Sampson
writes that “no-one familiar with the look of heavy simian eyebrows
ought... to find it difficult to see [‘qoph’) as a full-face view of an ape.”
Likewise, the Semitic letter ‘gimel’ (which means camel in Hebrew) con-
sisted of arising and descending line: “\.—Sampson believes that this may
be a stylized image of a camel’s most prominent feature: its hump. Other
letters took their forms from a hand, mouth, a snake. See Geoffrey Samp-
son, Writing Systems: A Linguistic Introduction (Stanford: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 1985), pp. 78-81.

These letter shapes are from the original Hebrew aleph-beth, known in
the later Jewish tradition as Ksav Juri (literally: “script of the Hebrews”).
These letters were eventually replaced, between the fifth and the third cen-
tury B.C.E., by the square Hebrew letters used today, themselves borrowed
froma late Aramaic version of the aleph-beth. See Hooker, et al., pp. 226-27;
also Gaur, p. 92.

15. David Diringer, The Alphabet (New York: Philosophical Library,
1948), p. 159.

16. Plato, Phaedrus, trans. R. Hackforth, in Plato: The Collected Dia-
logues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1982), sec, 230d.

17. Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (Garden City, N.Y.:
Doubleday & Co., 1961); and Homer, The Iliad, trans. Robert Fitzgerald
(Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday & Co., 1974).

18. Eric Havelock, The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and
Literacy from Antiquity to the Present (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1986), pp. 19, 83, 90. See also Havelock’s seminal text Preface to Plato
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963).

19. The earliest Greek inscriptions of an alphabetic nature yet to be
discovered are from around 740 or 730 B.c.E. (Hooker et al., pp. 230-32).
See also Rhys Carpenter, “The Antiquity of the Greek Alphabet,” Ameri-
can Journal of Archaeology 37 (1933); Havelock, Preface to Plato, pp. 49-52;
Havelock, The Muse Learns to Write, pp. 79-97; Goody, The Interface Be-
tween the Written and the Oral, pp. 40-47.

Notes to Pages 104-107 285

20. The evidence for this resistance is carefully documented by Eric A.
Havelock, the most accomplished scholar of the transition from orality to
literacy in ancient Greece, particularly in his essay “The Special Theory of
Greek Orality,” in The Muse Learns to Write.

21. Havelock, The Muse Learns to Write, p. 87.

22. There is a linguistic parallel here with the Vedic sutras, so named
because they, too, are sewn, or sutured, together.

23. See Adam Parry, ed., The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected
Papers of Milman Parry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971). See also Albert
Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960).

24. Ivan Illich and Barry Sanders, The Alphabetization of the Popular
Mind (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1988), p. 18.

25. See Ong, p. 35: “Fixed, often rhythmically balanced, expressions of
this sort and of other sorts can be found occasionally in print, indeed can be
‘looked up’ in books of sayings, but in oral cultures they are not occasional.
They are incessant. They form the substance of thought itself. Thought in
any extended form is impossible without them, for it consists in them.”

26. Today these disks are housed in the Parry Collection at Harvard
University.

27. See especially “Whole Formulaic Verses in Greek and Southslavic
Heroic Song,” as well as other essays in Adam Parry, The Making of Ho-
meric Verse.

28. Ibid., p. 378.

29. Ong, p. 59. In recent years Milman Parry’s conclusion that the
Homeric epics originated in a completely oral context has been disputed by
Jack Goody, another careful student of oral-literate contrasts. Goody
points out that while the Yugoslavian bards recorded by Parry and Lord
were themselves nonliterate, the culture in which they sang and improvised
their epic poems was not entirely untouched by literacy. Goody himself has
worked among the LoDagaa people of northern Ghana—a tribe unac-
quainted with literacy until quite recently—and he undertook to record
their oral myth, “the Bagre,” which is ritually recited during the course of
a long series of initiatory ceremonies. (Jack Goody, The Myth of the Bagre
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972). Along with many obvious similarities, he
has found marked differences between the LoDagaa recitation and both the
Slavic and the Homeric epics. The epic poems of Yugoslavia and of ancient
Greece seem much more formal and tightly composed than their African
counterparts (see “Africa, Greece and Oral Poetry,” in Goody, The Interface
Between the Written and the Oral). Further, according to Goody, the epic
mode of the bardic tales, centered on the legendary acts of a human hero or
a group of heroes, is foreign both to the Bagre and to other oral composi-

286 Notes to Pages 107-111

tions of indigenous Africa (on this, see also Ruth Finnegan, Oral Literature
in Africa [London: Oxford University Press, 1970]). Goody’s evidence
suggests that the epic mode is more proper to the poetry of cultures in the
earliest stages of literacy, rather than to that of purely oral peoples. He ar-
gues from this that the culture in which the Iliad and the Odyssey took
shape should not be considered a pristinely oral culture, since even if the
culture was without writing it had nevertheless been influenced (1) by the
much earlier existence of nonalphabetic writing systems (Linear A and
Linear B, which had been used, for economic and military accounting, by
the Minoan and Mycenaean cultures on the island of Crete, until such
writing vanished around 1100 B.C.£.), and (2) by the literacy of the neigh-
boring societies of the Near East, societies with which the Greek merchants
must have been in frequent contact (“Africa, Greece and Oral Poetry,” pp.
98, 107-9). Goody’s premise, that pre-Homeric Greece may have been in-
fluenced by the limited literacy of its Minoan and Mycenaean forebears, or
by the protophonetic literacy of some cultures across the Mediterranean,
may help us to understand why the Homeric gods and goddesses are as an-
thropomorphic as they are, much more human in form than are the deities
of most cultures entirely untouched by literacy. We may, however, accept
Goody’s argument for the indirect influence of literacy without concluding
that mainland Greece from 1100 to 750 B.c.£. made any direct use of writ-
ing, or had any wish to do so. For a lively debate on the orality of the
Homeric epics, see “Becoming Homer: An Exchange,” in the New York Re-
view of Books, May 14, 1992.

30. Havelock, The Muse Learns to Write, p. 112.

31. Philip Wheelwright, ed., The Presocratics (New York: Macmillan
Publishing Co., 1985), p. 45.

32. Illich and Sanders, pp. 22-23.

33. Plato, Meno, trans. W. K. C. Guthrie, in Plato: The Collected Dia-
logues, ed. Hamilton and Cairns sec. 72a (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1982).

34. The reader may object that the alphabet gave a fixed and visible
form not to the actual quality we call “justice,” but only to the word, to the
verbal label that “stands for” that quality. Surely Socrates was asking his
discussants to ponder the quality itself, not the mere word. However, the
clear distinction assumed by this objection, between words and what they
“stand for,” is a fairly recent distinction, itself made possible by the spread
of phonetic writing. Only after spoken words were fixed in writing could
they begin to be thought of as arbitrary “labels.” In the Athens of Socrates
and Plato, however—a society only emerging into literacy—the word was
still directly participant with the phenomenon that it invoked, the phenom-

Notes to Pages 111-118 287

enon still participant with the spoken word. If the new technology of writ-
ing imparted to the spoken word “virtue” a new sense of autonomy and
permanence, it brought a new sense of changelessness to the quality itself.

35. Ernest Fenollosa, cited in Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (New York:
New Directions Press, 1960), pp. 19-22.

36. Jacques Derrida has explored at great length the consequences of
this curious vanishing throughout the trajectory of Western (alphabetic)
philosophy, a tradition that ceaselessly forgets, or represses, its dependence
upon writing. See, for instance, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). Derrida, however, does
not notice some of the most glaring differences between alphabetic and
nonalphabetic modes of thought, differences that make themselves evident
in our experienced relation to the animate earth. While Derrida assimilates
all language to writing (/écriture), my approach has been largely the re-
verse, to show that all discourse, even written discourse such as this, is im-
plicitly sensorial and bodily, and hence remains bound, like the sensing
body, to a world that is never exclusively human.

37. By suggesting that the relation, in Plato’s writing, between the
immortal psyche and the intelligible Ideas is dependent upon the experi-
enced relation between the new, literate intellect and the visible letters of
the alphabet, my intention is not to effect a reduction of transcendent,
philosophic notions to banal, mundane experience, but rather to reawaken
a sense of the profoundly magical, transcendent activity that reading zs.
In this I am simply practicing the method of wakefulness urged by
Merleau-Ponty, whose phrase “the primacy of perception” expressed an in-
tuition that even the most transcendental philosophies remain rooted in,
and dependent upon, the very corporeal, sensuous world that they seek to
forget.

38. Phaedrus, 275a.

39. Ibid., 275b.

40. Ibid., 277e.

41. Ibid., 278a.

42. Ibid., 230d.

43. Two reputable and accessible firsthand accounts of how visions and
“medicine power” were and sometimes still are invoked among the Plains
tribes are Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions by John Fire Lame Deer and
Richard Erdoes, and Black Elk Speaks, by John Neihardt. Both books exist
in numerous editions.

44. Phaedrus, 236e.

45. Ibid., 275b.

46. Ibid., 259a—d.

288 Notes to Pages 118-125

47. Ibid., 259b-c.

48. Richard Nelson, Make Prayers to the Raven (Chicago: University of
Chicago, 1983), p. 17.

49. Jack Goody, in The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1977), has shown the dependence of such
“mental” lists upon visible, written lists. See also Walter Ong: “Primary
oral cultures commonly situate their equivalent of lists in narrative, as in
the catalogue of the ships and captains in the Iliad (Book 11, lines
461-879). ... In the text of the Torah, which set down in writing thought
forms still basically oral, the equivalent of geography (establishing the rela-
tionship of one place to another) is put into a formulary action narrative
(Numbers 33:1 6ff.): ‘Setting out from the desert of Sinai, they camped at
Kibroth-hattaavah. Setting out from Kibroth-hattaavah, they camped at
Hazeroth. Setting out from Hazeroth, they camped at Rithmah .. .’ and so
on for many more verses. Even genealogies out of such orally framed tradi-
tion are in effect commonly narrative. Instead of a recitation of names, we
find a sequence of ‘begats,’ of statements of what someone did: ‘Irad begat
Mahajael, Mahajael begat Methusael, Methusael begat Lamech’ (Genesis
4:18).” Ong, p. 99.

50. Walter Ong writes of this as the “agonistic” requirement in oral sto-
rytelling. See Ong, pp. 43-45.

51. Phaedrus, 262d.

52. Ibid., 247c.

53. For instance, the research of Milman Parry and Albert Lord (see n.
23 above).

54. Such is the focus of the research undertaken by such diverse schol-
ars as Eric Havelock, Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, Jack Goody, and,
most recently, Ivan Illich. See Havelock, Preface to Plato and The Muse
Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the
Present; Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typo-
graphic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962); Ong, Interfaces
of the Word (London: Cornell University Press, 1977) and Orality and Lit-
eracy: The Technologizing of the Word; Goody, The Interface Between the
Written and the Oral and The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); Illich and Sanders, The Alpha-
betization of the Popular Mind.

55. This is a special concern in Illich and Sanders, and in Goody, The
Interface Between the Written and the Oral.

56. Ivan Illich, Inthe Vineyard of the Text (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1993). Also Illich and Sanders, pp. 45-51.

57. This reciprocity, the circular manner in which a nuanced sense of

Notes to Pages 126-138 289

self emerges only through a deepening relation with other beings, is regu-
larly acknowledged in Buddhism as the “dependent co-arising of self and
other.”

58. Indeed, Merleau-Ponty takes the visual focus to be paradigmatic
for synaesthesia in general: “. . . the senses interact in perception as the two
eyes collaborate in vision.” Phenomenology of Perception, pp. 233-34.

59. It is important to realize that the focused structure of perception
ensures that I am able to participate with any phenomenon only by not par-
ticipating with other phenomena. I cannot directly perceive a particular en-
tity, in all its synaesthetic depth and otherness, without forfeiting, for the
moment, a direct encounter with other entities, which must therefore re-
main part of the indeterminate background—at least until they themselves
succeed in winning the focus of my senses. Thus, among many indigenous,
oral peoples, for whom alli things are potentially animate, it is nonetheless
clear that not all phenomena are experienced as animate all the time. Indeed,
certain phenomena, certain plants or insects that we ask about, may have
little or no overt significance to the tribal community; they may not even
have names within the storied language of the culture. Since these phe-
nomena do not solicit the focused attention of the human community, they ‘
are rarely, if ever, experienced by them as unique entities with their own in-
tensity and depth. Only those phenomena that regularly engage our synaes-
thetic attention stand out from the body of the land as autonomous powers
in their own right. If there is no focus, no juxtaposition of diverse sensory
modalities, then the phenomenon has no chance to move us, no chance to
play one part of our experience off another, no chance to teach us. It thus
remains flat, without much depth or dynamism, a purely background phe- .
nomenon.

60. A Carrier Indian, quoted in Diamond Jenness, The Carrier Indians
of the Bulkley River, Bureau of American Ethnology: Bulletin 133 (Wash-
ington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1943), p. 540 (emphasis added).

61. Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America, trans. Richard Howard
(New York: Harper & Row, 1984).

62. Ibid., p. 89.

63. Ibid., pp. 61-62.

CHAPTER 5: IN THE LANDSCAPE OF LANGUAGE

1. Phaedrus, 275d.
2. See especially Elizabeth Eisenstein’s two-volume work, The Print-
ing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transforma-

290 #8Notes to Pages 140-147

tions in Early Modern Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1979). An older, more iconoclastic source is McLuhan’s The Gutenberg
Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man.

3. For an auditory example of such tuning, the reader may wish to lis-
ten to a compact disc entitled Voices of the Rainforest (Rykodisk, 1991), a
compilation of field recordings of the Kaluli people of Papua New Guinea
made by ethnomusicologist Steven Feld. The Kaluli people sing with
birds, with insects, with tree frogs and tumbling waterfalls, with the rain it-
self. “And when the Kaluli sing with them, they sing /ike them. Nature is
music to the Kaluli ears. And Kaluli music is naturally part of the sur-
rounding soundscape... . In this rainforest musical ecology, the world re-
ally is a tuning fork.” The songful language of the Kaluli is rich with
onomatopoeic words that echo the speech of animals as well as mimic the
diverse swirling, bubbling, and plopping sounds made by water in the rain
forest. But like all oral languages, the participatory songs of the Kaluli peo-
ple are now threatened with extinction, in this case due to the encroach-
ment of oil-drilling operations: the new voices in the forest are those of
helicopters and drilling rigs. See also Steven Feld’s book, Sound and Senti-
ment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics and Song in Kaluli Expression, rev. ed. (Phil-
adelphia: Temple University Press, 1991).

4. F. Bruce Lamb, Wizard of the Upper Amazon: The Story of Manuel
Coérdova- Rios, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971).

5. Ibid., pp. 63-64.

6. Ibid., p. 51.

7. Ibid., pp. 48-49.

8. See, for instance, the works of Otto Jesperson and Roman Jacobson
cited in chap. 3, n. 8. Late in his life, Jacobson claimed that the reluctance
of linguists to acknowledge the inner significance of speech sounds arose
simply because early attempts to document this significance had failed to
dissect the speech sounds into their most basic constituents, Jacobson and
Waugh, The Sound Shape of Language (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1979), p. 185.

9. Richard Nelson, Make Prayers to the Raven: A Koyukon View of the
Northern Forest (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 2.

10. Ibid., p. 20.

11. Richard Nelson, The Island Within (San Francisco: North Point
Press, 1989), p. 110.

12. Nelson, Make Prayers to the Raven, p. 172.

13. Ibid., p. 86.

14. Ibid., p. 87.

15. Ibid.

Notes to Pages 147-158 291

16. Ibid., p. 109.

17. Ibid., p. 115.

18. Ibid., p. 110.

19. Ibid., p. 116.

20. Ibid., p. 111.

21. Ibid., p. 106.

22. Ibid.

23. Ibid.

24. Ibid., p. 115.

25. Ibid., p. 119.

26. Ibid., p. 16.

27. Nelson, Make Prayers to the Raven, p. 118.

28. John Bierhorst, The Mythology of North America (New York:
William Morrow & Co., 1985), pp. 6-7. See also, for instance, Gerald
Vizenor, Anishnabe Adisokan: Tales of the People (Minneapolis: Nodin
Press, 1970), p. 9.

29. Ibid., p. 127.

30. Ibid., p. 148.

31. Ibid., p.155.

32. Ibid., p. 176.

33. Ibid., p. 177.

34. Nelson, The Island Within, p. 117.

35. Ibid., p. 69.

36, A Koyukon elder, quoted in Nelson, Make Prayers to the Raven, p. 26.

37. The choice of cultures here is determined both by my intention to
present examples from contrasting biotic regions as well as by my wish to
suggest, in the short space of a chapter, the wildly variant ways in which
oral languages display their earthly dependence.

38. Keith Basso, “‘Stalking with Stories’: Names, Places, and Moral
Narratives Among the Western Apaches” (henceforth Basso, “Stalking”) in
Daniel Halpern, ed., On Nature: Nature, Landscape, and Natural History
(San Francisco: North Point Press, 1987).

39. Ibid., p. 101.

40. Ibid., pp. 105-6. See also Keith H. Basso, “‘Speaking with Names’:
Language and Landscape Among the Western Apache” (henceforth Basso,
“Speaking”), in Cultural Anthropology, May 1988, p. 111.

41. Basso, “Stalking,” p. 95.

42. Basso, “Speaking,” pp. 117-18. I have, however, transcribed the
story into the form used by Basso in Basso, “Stalking.”

43. Basso, “Stalking,” p. 107.

44. Ibid., p. 108.

292 Notes to Pages 159-171

45. Ibid., pp. 111-12.

46. Ibid., p. 112.

47. Ibid., p. 110.

48. Ibid.

49. Nick Thompson, quoted in Basso, “Stalking,” p. 112.

50. Basso, “Stalking,” p. 113; Basso, “Speaking,” pp. 118, 121-22.

51. Nick Thompson, quoted in Basso, “Stalking,” p. 96.

52. Wilson Lavender, quoted in Basso, “Stalking,” p. 97.

53. Basso, “Stalking,” p. 112.

54. Ibid., pp. 112-14.

55. Basso, “Speaking,” p. 110.

56. Quoted in Basso, “Stalking,” pp. 100-101.

57. Ronald M. Berndt and Catherine H. Berndt, “How Ooldea Soak
Was Made,” in The Speaking Land: Myth and Story in Aboriginal Australia
(London: Penguin Books, 1989), p. 42.

58. Berndt and Berndt, p. 213.

59. “Leech at Mamaraawiri,” in Berndt and Berndt, p. 211.

60. Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines (London: Penguin Books, 1987), p. 60.

61. The Pintupi people say that they recognize a song by its smell
(mayu) or taste (ngurru)—a remarkable example of synaesthesia.

62. See Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild (San Francisco: North
Point Press, 1990), p. 83, as well as Basso, “Stalking,” p. 101.

63. Chatwin, p. 60. See also T. G. H. Strehlow, Aranda Traditions (Mel-
bourne: Melbourne University Press, 1947), p. 17.

64. Billy Marshall-Stoneking, “Paddy: A Poem for Land Rights,” in
Singing the Snake: Poems from the Western Desert (Pymble, Austral.: Angus
& Robertson, 1990).

65. Chatwin, p. 14.

66. Colin Tatz, ed., Black Viewpoints: the Aboriginal Experience (Syd-
ney: Australia and New Zealand Book Co., 1975), p. 29. On this point, see
also an interview with aboriginal writer and educator Eric Willmot in
Omant, June 1987.

67. W. E. H. Stanner, “The Dreaming,” in Jerome Rothenberg and
Diane Rothenberg, eds., Symposium of the Whole (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1983), pp. 201-5. See also Nancy Munn, Walbirt Iconog-
raphy: Graphic Representation and Cultural Symbolism in a Central Aus-
tralian Society (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1973), pp. 131-33.

68. From Marshall-Stoneking, “Passage,” in Singing the Snake, p. 30.

69. Chatwin, pp. 105-6.

70. Helen Payne, “Rites for Sites or Sites for Rites? The Dynamics of
Women’s Cultural Life in the Musgraves,” in Peggy Brock, ed., Women,

Notes to Pages 171-190 293

Rites, and Sites: Aboriginal Women’s Cultural Knowledge (North Sydney,
Austral.: Allen & Unwin Limited, 1989), p. 56.

71. Chatwin, p. 52.

72. Catherine J. Ellis and Linda Barwick, “Antikirinja Women’s Song
Knowledge 1963-1972,” in Women, Rites, and Sites, pp. 31-32.

73. Ibid., pp. 34-36. While I have spoken of various aboriginal tradi-
tions in the present tense, the reader should be aware that many of these tra-
ditions are rapidly being lost under the influence of alphabetic civilization.

74. Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild, p. 82.

75. Chatwin, pp. 293-94.

76. Payne, “Rites for Sites or Sites for Rites?” in Women, Rites, and
Sites, p. 45.

77. Ibid.

78. Basso, “Speaking,” pp. 110-13.

79. The gender specificity here is intentional: almost all orators were
men.

80. Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1966).

81. Basso, “Stalking,” pp. 115-16.

CHAPTER 6:
TIME, SPACE, AND THE ECLIPSE OF THE EARTH

1. See Charles A. Reed, ed., Origins of Agriculture (The Hague: Mou-
ton & Co., 1977).

2. Ake Hultkrantz, Native Religions of North America (San Francisco:
Harper & Row, 1987), pp. 32-33.

3. T. C. McLuhan, Touch the Earth (New York: Outerbridge and
Dienstfrey, 1971), p. 42.

4. Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return (New York: Harper
& Row, 1959).

5. Ibid., p. vii.

6. See Todorov, pp. 116-19.

7, Marshall Sahlins, Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981).

8. Hultkrantz, p. 33.

9. Todorov, p. 85.

10. Rik Pinxten, Ingrid Van Doren, and Frank Harvey, Anthropology of

Space: Explorations into the Natural Philosophy and Semantics of the Navajo
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), p. 168.

294 1,Notes to Pages 190-199

11. Ibid., p. 36.

12. Benjamin Lee Whorf, “An American Indian Model of the Uni-
verse,” in Dennis Tedlock and Barbara Tedlock, eds., Teachings from the
American Earth (New York: Liveright, 1975), p. 122.

13. Ibid.

14. See especially Ekkehart Malotki, Hopi Time: A Linguistic Analysis
of the Temporal Concepts in the Hopi Language (New York: Mouton Pub-
lishers, 1983).

15. Whorf, “An American Indian Model,” p. 124.

16. Ibid.

17. Pinxten et al., p. 18.

18. Ibid., pp. 20~21.

19. Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, p. 104.

20. Ibid.

21. Indeed, the original tablets, smashed by Moses in anger upon seeing
the golden calf, were according to the Hebrew Bible inscribed directly “by
the finger of God.” Exodus 31:18. See also Rabbi Michael L. Munk, The
Wisdom in the Hebrew Alphabet: The Sacred Letters as a Guide to Fewish
Deed and Thought (Brooklyn: Mesorah Publications, 1983).

22. Edmond Jabes, Elya (Berkeley, Calif.: Tree Books, 1974), p. 72.

23. Aristotle, Physics, trans. Hippocrates G. Apostle (Bloomington: In-
diana University Press, 1969), book IV.

24. By the era of the printing press, the mechanical clock was slowly ex-
erting its influence throughout Europe. The presence of alphabetic writing
may help explain why the mechanical clock was invented in Europe and had
spread throughout European culture long before taking hold in the more
ideographic world of the Orient. Actually, a few elaborate clocklike ma-
chines had been designed and built for the private use of Chinese emperors
as early as the eleventh century, yet these were intended strictly as calen-
drical devices modeling the movements of the heavens—machines that
would allow the emperor to align his intentions and decrees more precisely
with astrological events. The order of time remained inseparable from such
cosmic, spatial phenomena.

In the West, on the contrary, the mechanical clock functioned to sever
the experience of time from the spatial cycles of the sun, moon, and stars,
marking out a series of determinate intervals that paid little heed to the
heavens or to the shifting lengths of daylight and darkness. Mechanical
clocks originated in monasteries (the strongholds of alphabetic literacy
throughout the Middle Ages), where they were used to regulate the times
for prayer. But by the middle of the fourteenth century, large clocks in the
belfries of churches and town halls rang the equal hours for the whole pop-

Notes to Pages 200-210 295

ulace, regulating the daily activities of the community according to an arti-
ficially determined and unvarying measure. Because the fixed hours of the
clock were ultimately independent of the sun, independent of its rising and
setting and the length of the daylight (all of which might vary not just in
different seasons but in different locations), clock-time could ultimately be
used to regulate transactions between different villages and towns, eventu-
ally establishing the sense of a wholly objective, quantitative time impervi-
ous to the particular rhythms of different locales and seasons. The voice of
this objective time was the implacable “tick-tock” of the clock’s internal
mechanism, which lent auditory force to the Aristotelian sense of time as a
countable series of discrete now-points. See Daniel Boorstin, The Discov-
erers (New York: Random House, 1983), pp. 36-46, 56-78.

25. Quoted in Alexandre Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite
Universe (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958), pp. 161, 162.

26. Ibid., pp. 161-62, 245.

27. Ibid., pp. 221-72.

28. Edmund Husserl, Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness,
trans. James S. Churchill (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964),
pp. 104, 150. See also David Wood, The Deconstruction of Time (Atlantic
Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1989), pp. 106-9.

29. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Ed-
ward Robinson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967).

30. Martin Heidegger, “Time and Being,” in On Time and Being, trans.
Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1972).

31. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, p. 259. It is worthy of
note that these words were written by Merleau-Ponty on June 1, 1960, less
than a year before his death, and more than a year and a half before Hei-
degger’s introduction of “time-space” in his January 1962 lecture “Time
and Being.”

32. Ibid., p. 267.

33. Ibid., p. 259.

34. Ibid., p. 13.

35. Heidegger, “Time and Being,” p. 11.

36. Ibid., pp. 11-12.

37. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 416.

38. In truth, the idea of time is a thoroughly horizon-laden thought for
Heidegger; in Being and Time he can hardly mention the phenomenon of
time in any capacity without linking it to the horizon metaphor. Thus,
when explicating the genesis of our ordinary conception of time as a linear
sequence, Heidegger translates Aristotle’s definition of time in the follow-
ing manner: “For this is time: that which is counted in the movement which

296 #£Notes to Pages 211-221

we encounter within the horizon of the earlier and later” (Being and Time,
p. 473). And indeed, the entire book ends with the question “Does time it-
self manifest as the horizon of Being?” (Being and Time, p. 488).

39. Heidegger, “Time and Being,” p. 13.

40. Ibid., pp. 16-17.

41. Ibid., p. 17.

42. Ibid., pp. 13, 17.

43. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, p. 267.

44. John Bierhorst, The Mythology of North America (New York:
William Morrow & Co., 1985), pp. 77-92. See also Ake Hultkrantz, Native
Religions of North America, pp. 91-94.

45. One finds resonances throughout the Americas: “The people came
‘out of the ground’ (Nez Percé); ‘the people grew up from the soil’ (Tara-
humara); ‘the people came out of the hills’ (Tzotzil); ‘the first man emerged
from the earth’ (Toba).” See John Bierhorst, The Way of the Earth (New
York: William Morrow & Co., 1994), p. 98.

46. A Jicarilla Apache storyteller, quoted in Bierhorst, Mythology of
North America, 1985, p. 82.

47. Hultkrantz, pp. 91-92.

48. George B. Grinell, Pawnee Hero Stories and Folk-tales (1889) (Lin-
coln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961), pp. 149-50.

49. Christopher Vecsey, Imagine Ourselves Richly: Mythic Narratives of
North American Indians (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1991), p. 45. See
also Dennis Tedlock, “An American Indian View of Death” in Dennis
Tedlock and Barbara Tedlock, eds., Teachings from the American Earth: In-
dian Religion and Philosophy (New York: Liveright, 1975), especially pp.
264-70.

50. June McCormick Collins, “The Mythological Basis for Attitudes
Towards Animals Among Salish-Speaking Indians,” Journal of American
Folklore 65, no. 258 (1952), p. 354.

51. Ake Hultkrantz, for instance, asserts that the belief among the
Wind River Shoshoni that the dead must follow the Milky Way to “the land
of the dead” conflicts with “another belief” according to which the dead
dwell beyond the mountains (Hultkrantz, p. 59). Examined phenomenolog-
ically, however, the two beliefs are not in conflict at all, since the visible path
of the Milky Way leads precisely beyond the mountains.

52. N. Scott Momaday, “Personal Reflections,” in Calvin Martin, ed.,
The American Indian and the Problem of History (New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1987), pp. 156-61.

53. See, for instance, John James Houston, “Songs in Stone: Animals in
Inuit Sculpture,” in Orion Nature Quarterly 4, no. 4 (Autumn 1985), p. 8.

Notes to Pages 222-229 297

54. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 416.
55. Heidegger, “Time and Being,” p. 15.
56. Ibid., p. 13.

CHAPTER 7:
THE FORGETTING AND REMEMBERING OF THE AIR

1. Robert Lawlor, Voices of the First Day: Awakening in the Aboriginal
Dreamtime (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 1992), p. 41.

2. See, for instance, Berndt and Berndt, pp. 73-125.

3. Lawlor, p. 42. ;

4. See Christopher Vecsey, Imagine Ourselves Richly: Mythic Narra-
tives of North American Indians (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1991),
chap. 7.

5. See, for instance, the words of the Lakota medicine man, Finger,
recorded by Dr. James R. Walker in Tedlock and Tedlock, pp. 208-13.

6. See D. M. Dooling, ed., The Sons of the Wind: The Sacred Stories
of the Lakota (New York: Parabola Books, 1984), for a beautiful and care-
fully researched telling of the sacred Lakota stories. Precise insights into
the nature of the wakan beings may be gleaned from these stories, aided by
the very useful glossary at the front of the book. The stories should be sup-
plemented by the words of the old Lakota holy men—Sword, Finger, One-
Star, and Tyon—recorded early in the twentieth century by Dr. James R.
Walker and excerpted in chap. 13, “Oglala Metaphysics,” in Tedlock and
Tedlock, pp. 205-18. Dr. Walker’s own essential research may be found in
J. R. Walker, The Sun Dance and Other Ceremonies of the Teton Dakota, An-
thropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History 16
(1917); and in Elaine Jahner, Lakota Myth (Lincoln: University of Ne-
braska Press, 1983).

7. The peace pipe was given to the Lakotas by White Buffalo Woman
as a gift from the buffalo, whose sacred breath is also visible when it is seen
on a cold day. Yet it is not only animals and plants that are assumed to
breathe and to partake of the air: in the imipi, or sweat lodge, ceremony,
water is poured on the red-hot rocks to release the living breath of the rocks
themselves: “You pray to the Great Spirit, to the sacred rocks, the tunka,
the inyan. They have no mouth, no eyes, no arms or legs, but they exhale
the breath of life.” From John Fire Lame Deer and Richard Erdoes, Lame
Deer, Seeker of Visions (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972), p. 180.

8. John Fire Lame Deer, in Lame Deer and Erdoes, p. 119.

9. See Tedlock and Tedlock, pp. 217-18.

298 Notes to Pages 230-238

10. Ibid., p. 218.

11. Ibid., p. 218.

12. James Kale McNeley, Holy Wind in Navajo Philosophy (Tucson:
University of Arizona Press, 1981), p. 1. This book is the fruit of twenty
years of association with the Navajo. McNeley is married to a Diné woman,
and the two of them teach on the Navajo Reservation in Arizona. Although
the Navajo commonly refer to themselves as “Diné”—the People—I have
mostly used the more familiar term “Navajo,” for convenience’ sake, in
this work.

13. Ibid., p. 2.

14. A Navajo singer and healer quoted in McNeley, pp. 9-10. Most of
the elders interviewed by McNeley requested that their identities remain
unpublished.

15. Ibid., pp. 16, 21.

16. Ibid., pp. 14-31.

17. Ibid., pp. 23, 33-34.

18. Ibid., pp. 34-35.

19. Ibid., p. 35.

20. Ibid., p. 35.

21. Ibid., p. 35. Emphasis added.

22. Ibid., p. 36.

23. Ibid., pp. 11, 36-37.

24. Ibid., p. 36.

25. Ibid., p. 24.

26. Ibid., p. 24.

27. Ibid., pp. 37-38.

28. Gary Witherspoon, Language and Art inthe Navajo Universe (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1977).

29. Witherspoon, p. 31; McNeley, p. 57.

30. Witherspoon, p. 61.

31. Leland C. Wyman, Blessingway (Tucson: University of Arizona
Press, 1970), p. 616. These words are translated from River Junction
Curly’s version of the Blessingway.

32. C. T. Onions, ed., The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (Ox-
ford: Clarendon Press, 1966), p. 720.

33. Ibid., p. 691.

34. Eric Partridge, Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern
English (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958), pp. 651-52.

35. Onions, p. 38; Partridge, p. 18.

36. Here is how the British linguist and historian Owen Barfield ad-
dressed these curious evidences embedded in our words:

Notes to Pages 239-241 299

such a purely material content as “wind”... and... such a purely ab-
stract content as “the principle of life within man or animal” are both
late arrivals in human consciousness. Their abstractness and their sim-
plicity are alike evidence of long ages of intellectual evolution. So far
from the psychic meaning of “spiritus” having arisen because someone
had the idea, “principle of life . . .” and wanted a word for it, the abstract
idea “principle of life” is itself a product of the old concrete meaning
of “spiritus,” which contained within itself the germs of both later sig-
nifications. We must, therefore, imagine a time when “spiritus” or
“pneuma,” or older words from which these had descended, meant nei-
ther breath, nor wind, nor spirit, nor yet all three of these things, but
when they simply had their own peculiar meaning, which has since, in
the course of the evolution of consciousness, crystallized into the three
meanings specified. . . .

See Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances (Middletown, Conn., Wesleyan
University Press, 1965), pp. 80-81.

37. Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication So-
ciety, 1985), Genesis 1:2. This is the most authoritative English translation
of the Hebrew Bible from the traditional Hebrew text. The traditional He-
brew name for the Bible, Tanakh, is an acronym formed by the first letters
of the three sections of the Hebrew text: Torah (Instruction), Nevi’?im
(Prophets), and Kethuvim (Writings). Although the relevant phrase in the
first sentence of the Torah is commonly translated into English as “the
spirit of God,” “a wind from God” is actually a more direct rendering of
the original Hebrew,

38. McNeley, p. 10.

39. Genesis 2:7. Just as the Hebrew term for human (adam) relates di-
rectly to the word for earth (adamah), so also the English term “human”
relates directly to the word “humus”—the earth or soil. Thus, both the He-
brew adam and the English “human” can be precisely translated as “earth-
ling,” or “earthborn one.”

40. This is not to suggest that all of the ancient Hebrews were able, or
even allowed, to read—far from it. Yet to the extent that they took the writ-
ten commandments as their supreme laws, and to the extent that the story
about receiving those scribed commandments, at Mount Sinai, became
their foundational story, every Hebrew life was structured in accordance
with Scripture—with writing—whether the individual was literate or not.

41. Anexcellent analysis of the extent to which the lack of vowel letters
in the Hebrew writing system can or cannot be thoroughly explained by the
structure of the Hebrew language is found in Geoffrey Sampson’s master-
ful text, Writing Systems: A Linguistic Introduction (Stanford: Stanford

300 #Notes to Pages 243-246

University Press, 1985), pp. 77-98. Sampson’s analysis shows that even a
reader fluent in Hebrew encounters a relatively high degree of ambiguity
when reading a traditional text without vowel marks; it is this ambiguity
that forces the reader of Hebrew to actively grapple with conflicting mean-
ings, conflicting ways of sounding the text.

42. While Hebrew words that share the same group of consonants tend
to have a related meaning, meanings can still change drastically with differ-
ent vowel sounds. For instance, while the word “TSaHaK” means “sexual
intercourse,” the word “TSaHoK” means “laughter.” Or consider the He-
brew words “DiR” (a stable), “DaR” (mother-of-pearl), “DOR” (genera-
tion), “DdR” (ruin), “DOR” (to dwell).

43. Barry W. Holtz, ed., Back to the Sources: Reading the Classic Jewish
Texts (New York: Summit Books, 1984), pp. 16-17.

44. See, for instance, Lawrence Kushner, The Book of Letters: A Mys-
tical Alef-bait (New York: Harper & Row, 1975). Also Rabbi Michael L.
Munk, The Wisdom in the Hebrew Alphabet: The Sacred Letters as a Guide
to Jewish Deed and Thought (New York: Mesorah Publications, 1983). See
also Aryeh Kaplan, Sefer Yetzirah: The Book of Creation.

45. Moshe Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives (New Haven: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 1988), pp. 234-37.

46. Perle Epstein, Kaballah: The Way of the Jewish Mystic (Boston:
Shambhala, 1988), pp. 98-99.

47. The voluminous research on Kabbalah conducted by the great
twentieth-century scholar Gershom Scholem has led many to believe that
the Kabbalah was something of an anomaly within traditional Judaism,
sparked by non-Jewish influences, like Gnosticism, which ostensibly in-
filtrated Jewish circles early on and combined with other, Neoplatonic
influences during the Middle Ages. However, more recent scholarship—
particularly the extensive and ongoing research of the brilliant Israeli
scholar Moshe Idel—has called into question some of Scholem’s assump-
tions, and has begun to suggest the profoundly endemic relation of Kab-
balah to the very core of ancient and medieval Judaism. Idel’s carefully
reasoned scholarship suggests that many Kabbalistic beliefs and practices
were preserved and transmitted orally long before being written down, and
that the fragmentary written teachings that first surfaced during the twelfth
century were expressions of a coherent tradition of esoteric Jewish praxis
that likely extended back to the archaic origins of Judaism itself. See espe-
cially Idel, Kabbalah, particularly chaps. 2, 5, and 7. See also Gershom
Scholem, Major Trends in fewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken Books,
1961).

48. Idel, pp. 97-103; Epstein, pp. 93-94.

Notes to Pages 247-252 301

49. Idel, p. 100; Epstein, p. 88; Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah (New
York: New American Library, 1974), pp. 351-55.

50. Quoted in Epstein, pp. 59-60. The Zohar was almost certainly writ-
ten in the latter half of the thirteenth century by Moses de Leén of
Guadalajara. De Leén himself, however, ascribed authorship to the sec-
ond-century sage who figures as the central character in the text, Rabbi
Shim’on bar Yohai.

51. Quoted in Epstein, p. 66.

52. Daniel Chanan Matt, ed. and trans., Zohar, The Book of Enlighten-
ment (New York: Paulist Press, 1983), pp. 60-62. In the Zohar the soul-
breath, or neshamah, also has intermediary aspects resembling the
Messenger Winds of the Navajo, as is evident from this quote: “The ne-
shamah of ahuman being .. . leaves him every single night. In the morning
she returns to him and dwells in his nostrils.” See p. 219n.

53. Arthur Green and Barry W. Holtz, eds., Your Word Is Fire: The Ha-
stdic Masters on Contemplative Prayer (New York: Schocken Books, 1987),
p. 48.

54. Shneur Zalman of Ladi, “The Portal of Unity and Faith,” in An
Anthology of Fewish Mysticism, trans. Raphael Ben Zion (New York: Ju-
daica Press, 1981), pp. 83-128. For a book-length commentary on this im-
portant text, see Adin Steinsaltz, The Sustaining Utterance, trans. Yehuda
Hanegbi (London: Jason Aronson, 1974).

55. Green and Holtz, p. 43.

56. Even in the written narratives of the Bible, YHWH typically mani-
fests himself in atmospheric phenomena, from the rains that flood the earth
for forty days in Genesis, to the tumultuous whirlwind that addresses Job in
the later writings. In the pivotal theophany atop Mount Sinai, YHWH dis-
plays himself to the assembled tribes as a storm cloud, thundering and
lightning, and it is as a cloud that YHWH accompanies the Israelites in
their subsequent wanderings through the desert.

57. The rest of Europe inherited these Greek innovations only by way
of the Romans, who modified the Greek shapes into the capital letter forms
used today throughout Western Europe and the Americas. See David
Diringer’s excellent, if somewhat dated, overview, The Alphabet: A Key to
the History of Mankind (New York: Philosophical Library, 1953).

58. Plato provides a remarkably precise description of this new situa-
tion when he has Socrates state, in the Phaedrus, that written words “seem
to talk to you as though they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything
about what they say, from a desire to be instructed, they go on telling you
just the same thing forever” (Phaedrus, 275d). Socrates’ description clearly
indicates the apparent autonomy of Greek texts, yet at the same time makes

302 Notes to Pages 252-260

evident the monotonous, almost mechanical efficiency of the new alphabet.
A Hebrew reader could never claim that a traditional text “goes on telling
you just the same thing forever,” for the simple reason that the consonantal
text may subtly vary its words, and hence its meanings, each time that the
reader engages it!

59. Philip Wheelwright, ed., The Pre-Socratics (New York: Macmillan
Publishing Co., 1985), pp. 60, 288. Anaximenes, it is reported, also claimed
that the air was the immortal and ever-moving source of all phenomena;
that even the gods themselves were born of the air! See Wheelwright, pp.
61-63.

60. Phaedrus, 250c.

61. The explicit fusion of Christian theology with Platonic philosophy
was accomplished by the early Church theologians—first by Justin Martyr;
later by Clement of Alexandria and Origen; finally, and most profoundly,
by Augustine. For an accessible and engaging discussion of Christianity’s
alliance with Greek philosophy, see Richard Tarnas’s sweeping work The
Passion of the Western Mind (New York: Ballantine Books, 1991).

62. Thus it was that two decades ago a careful scientific study of the at-
mosphere, using new, highly sensitive instruments, yielded a new astonish-
ment at the anomalous chemical makeup of the medium. The chemical
composition of the earthly atmosphere was very far from any stable equilib-
rium, and yet, remarkably, this composition seemed to be actively and quite
sensitively maintained by some unknown and enigmatic set of processes.
This disclosure led several scientists to hypothesize that the composition of
the atmosphere was being actively monitored and modulated by all of the
earth’s organic constituents acting collectively, as a vast, planetary metabo-
lism. The Gaia hypothesis—named for the ageless mother of the gods in
the oral mythology of ancient Greece—proposed that the earthly world in
which we find ourselves must be reconceptualized as a living entity.

Whatever the scientific fate of the Gaia hypothesis, its emergence pro-
vides a striking illustration of the way in which a renewed awareness of the
air forces us to recognize, ever more vividly, our interdependence with the
countless organisms that surround us, and ultimately encourages us to
speak of the encompassing earth in the manner of our oral ancestors, as an
animate, living presence. See David Abram, “The Perceptual Implications
of Gaia” in The Ecologist (Summer 1985); reprinted in Dharma Gaia: A
Harvest of Essays in Buddhism and Ecology, edited by A. H. Badiner (San
Francisco: Parallax Press, 1990). Also see Stephen Schneider and Penelope
Boston, eds., Scientists on Gaia (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1991).

Notes to Pages 269-270 303

CODA: TURNING INSIDE OUT

1. Paul S. Martin, “40,000 Years of Extinction on the ‘Planet of
Doom,’” in Paleogeography, Paleoclimatology, Paleoecology 82 (1990), pp.
187-201. See also Paul Martin and Richard Klein, eds., Quaternary Extinc-
tions (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1984).

2. In contrast to a long-standing tendency of Western social science, this
work has not attempted to provide a rational explanation of animistic be-
liefs and practices. On the contrary, it has presented an animistic or partic-
ipatory account of rationality. It has suggested that civilized reason is
sustained only by a deeply animistic engagement with our own signs. To
tell the story in this manner—to provide an animistic account of reason,
rather than the other way around—is to imply that animism is the wider
and more inclusive term, and that oral, mimetic modes of experience still
underlie, and support, all our literate and technological modes of reflection.
When reflection’s rootedness in such bodily, participatory modes of expe-
rience is entirely unacknowledged or unconscious, reflective reason be-
comes dysfunctional, unintentionally destroying the corporeal, sensuous
world that sustains it.

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Permissions Acknowledgments
aw

Chapter One, “The Ecology of Magic,” was originally published in some-
what different form in Orton Magazine.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint pre-
viously published material:

The Ecco Press: Excerpt from “From March’79” by Tomas Transtromer and
translated by John F. Deane, from Selected Poems 1954-1986, edited by
Robert Hass. Copyright © 1987 by Tomas Transtromer and John F. Deane.
Published by The Ecco Press in 1987. Excerpt from “Stalking with Stories”
by Keith Basso from Antaeus: On Nature, edited by Daniel Halpern, copy-
right © 1986 by Antaeus, New York. First published by The Ecco Press in
1986. Reprinted by permission of The Ecco Press.

ETT Impnnt: Excerpts from “Passage” and “Paddy: A Poem for Land
Rights” from Singing the Snake by Billy Marshall-Stoneking (Angus &
Robertson, Pymble, Australia, 1990). Reprinted by permission of ETT
Imprint.

Barry W. Holtz: Excerpts from Your Word Is Fire, edited and translated by
Arthur Green and Barry W. Holtz (Schocken Books, New York, 1987).

Reprinted by permission of Barry W. Holtz.
313

314 Permissions Acknowledgments

Elizabeth S. Lamb: Excerpt from Wizard of the Upper Amazon by F. Bruce
Lamb, copyright © 1971, 1974 by F Bruce Lamb. Reprinted by permission
of Elizabeth S. Lamb, owner of copyright. _

Penguin Books Australia Ltd: Excerpt from The Speaking Landby Ronald M.
Berndt and Catherine H. Berndt (Penguin Books, Ringwood, Australia,
1989). Reprinted by permission of Penguin Books Australia Ltd.

Routledge: Excerpts from Phenomenology of Perception by Maurice Merleau-
Ponty, translated by Colin Smith (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1962).
Reprinted by permission of Routledge.

The University of Arizona Press: Excerpts from Holy Windin Navajo Philos-
ophy by James Kale McNeley (The University of Arizona Press, Tucson,
1981). Reprinted by permission of The University of Arizona Press.

University of California Press: Excerpts from Smoothing the Ground: Essays
on Native American Oral Culture by Brian Swann, copyright © 1983 by The
Regents of the University of California. Reprinted by permission of the
University of California Press.

The University of Chicago Press: Excerpts from Make Prayers to the Ravenby
Richard Nelson (The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1983). Re-
printed by permission of The University of Chicago Press.

Viking Penguin and Jonathan Cape: Excerpts from The Songlines by Bruce
Chatwin, copyright © 1987 by Bruce Chatwin. Rights outside the United
States administered on behalf of the Estate of Bruce Chatwin by Jonathan
Cape, London. Reprinted by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of
Penguin Books USA Inc., and Jonathan Cape.

Aboriginal Australians:
awareness and, 227
conception beliefs, 166-68
legal rights, protection of, 178
Walkabout, 116, 168, 187
women’s sacred knowledge,

171-72
see also Dreamtime beliefs

absence, modes of, 212-14, 222

Abulafia, Abraham, 247

‘agodzaahi tales, 156-60, 163

agriculture, 184, 263-64

air (breath; wind), 15-16, 26-27,

223, 225-60

ancient Greece, 250-53

ancient Hebrews, 239-43,
247-50

awareness, connection to, 227,
233-34, 237-39, 253-57,
260

chemical composition of earthly
atmosphere, 302762

Index

desacralization of, 250-54, 258

etymological perspective on,
237-38, 298736

human participation in, 235-37

indigenous cultures and, 226-37

invisibility of, 225-26

language and, 233

modern obliviousness to the air,
258-60

mysticism and, 247-50

nilch’t (Holy Wind), 230-37

time and, 229-30

uniting of all life through, 226,
234, 238

vowel sounds and, 99-100,
240-43, 251-52, 257, 299741

Alcuin, 138
aleph-beth (Hebrew alphabet),

284n14
human voice and, 195
mystical nature of letters, 132-

33, 245-47
315

316 Index
aleph-beth (cont.)
numerical value of letters, 246
pictographic inheritance, 101
sensible phenomena and, 100-101
simplicity of, 99-100
vowel sounds, absence of,
99-100, 240-43, 257, 299741
widespread influence, 100
alphabets: see aleph-beth (Hebrew
alphabet); Greek alphabet
Amahuaca people, 141-44
Anaximenes, 252, 30259
ancestor worship, 15-16
animal communication, 78-79, 81
animism, 9-10, 14-16, 56, 57,
69-71, 116-21, 130-35, 3032
see also magic, participation,
shamanism
ants, 11-13
Apache people:
‘agodzaahi tales, 156-60, 163
discourse of, 154-62
ethics and etiquette of, 155-61
legal rights, protection of, 178
Aristotle, 47, 48, 198
art, 27822
Art of Memory (Yates), 176
Athapaskan languages, 145, 154, 192
augury, 95, 149
Australians: see Aboriginal Aus-
tralians
awareness, 9
air’s connection to, 227, 233-34,
237-39, 253-54
air’s detachment from, 253-57,
260
each place its own awareness,
262
Aztec people, 134-35, 187, 189

Bali, 3, 5, 11-13, 14-15, 16-19
Barfield, Owen, 298736

Basso, Keith, 154, 155, 159, 161,
163, 178
bees, 79
Being and Time (Heidegger), 205,
209, 211, 222, 295738
Berkeley, George, 200
Berndt, Ronald and Catherine, 177
beyond-the-horizon, 210, 212, 214
air and, 226
indigenous cultures and,
217-20, 221-22
Bible: see Hebrew Bible
bioregionalism, 271-72
biospheric despoilment, 264, 27776
air and, 258-60
by indigenous cultures, 269
language and, 86
biospheric web, 65, 84-85
birds, 25
of Himalayas, 23, 24
interpenetration of human and
avian utterances, 146-50
language among, 78, 81
prophesies by, 149-50
Black Elk, 186
body:
as active and open form, 49-50
boundaries of, 46-47
as experiencing self, 45-46, 47
as magical entity, 15
phenomenology and, 37, 44-50
stories and, 120
see also perception
“Body as Expression, and Speech”
(Merleau-Ponty), 74, 81
breath: see air
Buddhism, 288757

carbon dioxide, atmospheric, 259
caribou, 146

Chatwin, Bruce, 170, 171, 173-74
chiasm, 127-28, 129, 131

Chinese writing, 96, 97, 98, 99,
111, 28376
Christianity, 8, 15, 231
desacralization of air and,
253-54
Greek philosophy, alliance with,
253, 30261
heaven, 10, 220
nature-disdain and, 94
cicadas, 118, 119, 121
circular character of visible world,
189
clocks, 294n24
conception beliefs, 166-68
condors, 24, 25
consciousness, 9
Cook, James, 187
Copernican worldview, 42-43
Cérdova-Rios, Manuel, 141-42,
143, 144
Cortés, Hernan, 134, 187
Cosmos and History: The Myth of
the Eternal Return (Eliade),
186-87
Course in General Linguistics (Saus-
sure), 82
creation stories, 70, 186
Creek people, 228
Cree people, 87, 88
Crisis of European Sciences
(Husserl), 2766
Critique of Pure Reason (Kant),
200-201
cultural genocide, 178
cyclical time: see time

Darwin, Charles, 78

death, beliefs about, 15-16, 218-20,
296751

deconstruction, 281717

de Leén, Moses, 301750

Derrida, Jacques, 282n2, 28736

Index 317
Descartes, René, 31-32, 35, 42, 48,
78
Descent of Man (Darwin), 78
despoilment of nonhuman nature:
see biospheric despoilment
Diné people: see Navajo people
Distant Time stories, 118, 119,
146, 148, 150-51, 163
Dogen, 280715
Dogon people, 87
Dooling, D. M., 29776
Dreamtime beliefs (in Aboriginal
Australia), 119, 163-66
air and, 227
bleeding of Dreamtime into
here and now, 169-72
codes of behavior and, 175-76
land and language, relation be-
tween, 172-77
mnemonics of, 175, 176—77
printed versions of stories, 177
songlines, 166-68
space and time, 193
spirit children, 166—67
survival in desert and, 174-75
Duran, Diego, 189

earth, 42-43, 267-72
enveloping earth, 182, 216-17
ecstatic nature of time, 205, 209,

222
Edie, James M., 75-76
Egypt, 97
Einstein, Albert, 198, 204
El’azar, 247

Elements (Euclid), 198
Eliade, Mircea:
on cyclical concept of time,
186-87
on language and shamanism,
88-89
on linear concept of time, 194

318 Index

emergence stories, 217-18
Empedocles, 108
environmental ethic, 69
epidemic illness, 22
ethics:

environmental ethic, 69

land as guardian of right behav-

ior, 155-61, 175-76

ethology, 79
Euclid, 198
evolutionary theory, 78
exile, experience of, 195-97
extinctions, 22, 259, 269, 270-71

Feld, Steven, 29073
fireflies, 4
Flesh, 66-69, 85
fox sparrows, 150
future, 201-2
sensory landscape and, 206-17

Gabelentz, Hans Georg von der,
2808
Gaia hypothesis, 27674, 302n62
Galileo, 32, 35
genetic inheritance, 50
gesture, 74-76, 79-80
global warming, 259
God, 94; see also YHWH
golem, 246-47
Goody, Jack, 28529, 288n49
Grammont, Maurice, 2808
gravity, 200, 272
Great Chain of Being, 48
Greece, ancient
air, desacralization of, 250-53
nature, perspective on, 94-95,
102-3, 117-18
oral tradition, 104, 105-7
pre-Socratic philosophers, 108
space/time distinction and,
197-99

see also Greek alphabet
Greek alphabet (ancient), 111,
250-51
abstraction, 101-2
incorporation within Athenian
life, 108
mechanical efficiency of, 301758
oral tradition, alliance with, 105
resistance to, 104
vowel sounds, 251-52, 257
ground, 281717; see also under-the-
ground
gulls, 25
Gutenberg, Johann, 138

Hadreas, Peter, 2797
Haile, Father Berard, 231
Hasidism, 247-49
Havelock, Eric, 104, 107, 109
Hawaiian people, 187
hearing, 128-30
heaven, 10, 220, 253-54
Hebrew alphabet: see aleph-beth
Hebrew Bible, 195-97, 239, 240,
242, 243-44, 288749, 299737
Hebrew people:
air, beliefs about, 239-43, 247-50
exile experience, 195-97
mystical tradition, 132-33,
245-50, 300247
pantheistic notions, 246
postbiblical texts, 244
reading, interactive approach to,
243-44
religiosity of, 240
Scriptural structuring of life,
299n40
time, concept of, 194-97
Hecataeus of Miletos, 197
Heidegger, Martin, 205-6, 208-9,
211-12, 222, 29538
Heraclitus, 108

Herder, Johann Gottfried, 76
Herodotus, 197
herons, 25
hieroglyphs, 97
Himalayas, 23, 26
history, 181, 188, 194, 197-98
Hojier, Harry, 162
Holtz, Barry, 243-44
Holy Wind, 230-37
Holy Wind in Navajo Philosophy
(McNeley), 230-34, 29812
Homeric epics, 102-4
oral nature of, 105-7, 28529
Hopi people, 190-92, 219
horizon, 189
time and, 209-11, 212, 295238
see also beyond-the-horizon
Hultkrantz, Ake, 185, 296751
human equality, idea of, 270
human-made artifacts, 64-65
human specialness, 47-49
language and, 77-79, 263
Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 27975
hunting:
connection to animal society
and, 88, 140-44
overhunting, avoidance of, 143
respect for animals, 152,
156-57
synaesthesia and, 129
Husserl, Edmund, 35-44, 27676
on body, 44—45
on intersubjectivity, 37, 39
on life-world, 40, 41, 42-43
on mental character of phenom-
enal reality, 36-37
on scientific practice, 43
on space-time, 42-43, 204-5

Idel, Moshe, 300747
ideograms, 97-98
idolatry, 240

Index 319
Illich, Ivan, 32, 105, 2882754, 56
imagination, 58
indigenous, oral cultures:
air, various beliefs regarding,
226-37
creation stories, 70, 186
death, various beliefs about,
15-16, 218-20, 296751
displacement from traditional
lands, 178, 269
drawbacks of, 269
emergence stories, 217-18
equilibrial relation with local
ecologies, 93-94
focused attention and, 289759
nature as source of learning,
116-17
phenomenology and, 69-72,
87-89
“place” conception of space,
182-83, 190
preservation of knowledge with
stories, 105-7, 109, 119-21,
28525, 288749
space-time conceptions, 188-93,
217-22
synaesthetic association of visi-
ble topology with auditory re-
call, 176-77
time, cyclical conceptions of,
185-87, 229-30
writing’s impact on, 184-85
see also hunting; oral discourse
in indigenous societies;
shamanism; specific
peoples
Indonesia, 4, 5, 21, 178; see also Bali
insects, 4, 18-20, 79, 118, 121
intellect: see psyché
intersubjectivity, 37-39, 276n5
“Intertwining—The Chiasm”
(Merleau-Ponty), 127

320 =6© Index

Inuit people, 87, 118-19, 221
Ireland, 182

Jabes, Edmond, 196

Jacobson, Roman, 28078, 29078
Java, 21

Jeffers, Robinson, 271
Jesperson, Otto, 28078, 29078

Kabbalah, 133, 244, 245-49,
300247, 301250
kachinas, 219
Kaluli people, 29073
Kant, Immanuel, 200-201
kivas, 218
Koyukon people, 69, 70
discourse of, 145-53
Distant Time stories, 118, 119,
146, 148, 150-51, 163
hunting practices, 152
living conditions, 145

Lakota people, 71, 189, 228-30,
295nn6, 7
Lamb, F. Bruce, 141
Lame Deer, John Fire, 225, 229
language, xi
acquisition of, 75
air and, 233, 254
animal communication and,
78-79, 81
as arbitrary but conventionally
agreed upon set of words, 77,
79
biospheric despoilment and, 86
boundary between humans and
sensuous world created by,

71-72, 255-57

defining “language,” problem
of, 73

gestural dimension, 74-76,
79-82

human specialness and, 77-79,
263
landscape and, 85-86, 86-92,
137-79, 263
as living system (webwork),
82-84
objectification through writing,
107
perception and, 90—92, 255-57
phonemes, implicit significance
of, 2808
phonetic texture of words,
279n7
primordial depth in, 144—45
as property of all phenomena,
81-82, 85-86, 87-92, 263
secondary layer of conventional
meanings, 79
sensorial reality, connection to,
84-89
shamanism and, 88-89
soundful meaning, 75-76, 79-82
word magic, 87-89
see also oral discourse in indige-
nous societies; reading; writ-
ing systems
Language and Art in the Navajo
Universe (Witherspoon),
236
Lawlor, Robert, 227
Leibniz, Gottfried, 200
lesser yellowlegs, 148-49
Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien, 57
life-world, 40-43, 65
linguistics, 82
LoDagaa people, 285229
logograms, 28375
loons, 146-47
Lord, Albert, 105, 106, 107
Lovelock, James, 2764
lynx, 152
Lysias, 115

magic, 5
of spoken words, 86-89
of written letters, 132-33
see also animism; participation;
shamanism; sleight-of-hand
magic
making sense, 264-65
malaria, 20
Malaysia, 178
“manifested” and “manifesting”
modalities of existence,
191-93
mathematics, 32, 35
Maya people, 134, 28375
McNeley, James Kale, 230, 233,
298n12
medicine persons: see shamanism
medicine wheels, 189
Meditations (Descartes), 32
memory palace, 176
Meno, 110
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 44-69,
73-86, 89-90, 124, 277n11,
28117, 28737
on body, 45, 46, 47
on chiasm, 127-28
on Flesh, 66, 68
on gesture, 74
goals regarding phenomenology,
44
on language, 74, 75-76, 77, 81,
83-84, 86
on mescaline use, 61
on past and future as aspects of
sensory landscape, 207, 208,
212, 215
on perception, 52-53, 55-56, 57,
60, 61, 90
on purpose of phenomenology, 36
Saussure and, 82, 83
on space-time, 205-6, 295731
on synaesthesia, 60, 61

Index 321

Merton, Thomas, 73

mescaline, 61

Milky Way, 3, 63, 220

Mishnah, 244

mnemonics (memory), 106, 121,
175, 176-77, 183-84, 195

Momaday, N. Scott, 221

monsoon rains, 17-18

more-than-human world: see sensu-
ous world

Muir, John, 85

music, 29073

myths, practical nature of, 119-21

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